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The TNR Wealth Poll: Americans Say Spread the Dough [1]

['Ryan Kearney', 'Edith Olmsted', 'Timothy Noah', 'Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein', 'Phoebe Chen', 'Lily Meyer']

Date: 2025-06-19

When Senator Bernie Sanders took his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to Missoula, Montana, in mid-April, he had one person in particular on his mind. “Mr. Musk himself owns more wealth than the bottom 56 percent of American households,” he said. “That is not what this country is supposed to be about.” But it is, he emphasized, what Republicans in Congress are about. “It is not good enough for them that Musk owns more wealth than the bottom 56 percent of households. Not good enough for them that the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent,” Sanders said. “So now they’re working on legislation that would provide $1.1 trillion in tax breaks to the 1 percent.” With his typical gruff brio, he called on Americans to fight back: “We’re not going to give Musk and his billionaire friends a tax break. We’re going to demand they start paying their fair share of taxes.”

Some political observers have been surprised by Sanders’s recent record-breaking crowds, which give credence to his claim that not only progressives, but independents and even Republicans, are being energized by his message. But if you look at the results of a new poll commissioned by The New Republic, it’s not so surprising at all. The survey of 958 registered voters, conducted April 9–14 by Embold Research, found broad frustration with how wealth is distributed in America, specifically the extreme concentration of wealth among the superrich. It suggests that most Americans—even a startling number of Republicans—agree with pretty much everything Sanders said. If the poll can be summarized in one sentence, it’s this: Americans have a solid grasp of the highly unequal concentration of wealth in the United States—and they think it’s rotten.

TNR’s poll asked voters about economic inequality in America, specifically their view of how the middle class and the rich have done over the last 40 years. A resounding 78 percent of respondents said the rich have gained “much more” than the middle class, and another 10 percent said, “a little more.” The former answer is closer to the truth: Since the 1970s, upper-class income has grown at a significantly higher pace than middle-class income. And voters aren’t happy about it: Nearly three in four poll respondents said that “the rich have too much”; even 48 percent of Republicans felt this way. Given that sentiment, it stands to reason that people also overwhelmingly believe that the rich aren’t taxed nearly enough: Two-thirds overall, including 43 percent of Republicans, said that the top 0.1 percent pay “too little” in taxes—and they felt roughly the same about the top 1 percent. A majority, 56 percent, also said that the top 10 percent aren’t being taxed enough. Conversely, 64 percent of all respondents—and even 54 percent of Republicans—believe that the bottom 50 percent of Americans pay “too much” in taxes.

From a Democratic perspective, those are perhaps the poll’s most optimistic findings, showing broad agreement among Americans that the rich should be taxed more and lower-income people should be taxed less. These views explain why politicians who adopt this position and hammer it on the stump, like Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have amassed huge followings. The findings also make one wonder why more elected Democrats—most of whom do want to increase taxes on the rich and reduce financial burdens on working-class and poor people—aren’t following Sanders’s lead rhetorically, given how unequivocal the polling results are.

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/196202/new-republic-wealth-inequality-poll-tax-rich

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