The trick is to make you defend billionaires by pretending you are a plumber. In his Fox News Opinion column, Ted Jenkin’s “The DSA’s dangerous fine print. They’re coming for millionaires (and you)” argues that the real target is not the roughly 800 billionaires but the $1 million threshold in Democratic Socialists’ tax proposals, including those associated with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The column names the plumber selling his business, the bridal-shop owner cashing out, and the family inheriting a paid-off home. The billionaires are offstage.
That panic is built on a category error.
A $1 million capital gain is not a $1 million salary. Income is what you earn over a year from work. A capital gain is the profit from selling something for more than you paid. The plumber who runs a business for thirty years and sells it for $1.5 million is not earning $1.5 million every year. He built an asset and converted it to cash once, probably at the end of his career. That money replaces a pension he never had.
Taxing that gain at ordinary-income rates would be a real hit. Let’s concede it cleanly. A long-time owner who builds and sells one small business for seven figures could pay more under El-Sayed’s proposal than under today’s 20 percent long-term capital-gains rate. That is a true cost.
It is not, however, the same cost as taxing a billionaire’s $50 million in appreciated stock or a trust holding commercial real estate. One sale, one retirement, one family business: these are not interchangeable with a permanent hoard of appreciating assets. Treating every $1 million as the same thing is the trick Jenkin pulls.
Jenkin is right about one thing: most people do not read the fine print. They hear “tax the billionaires” and tune out when a proposal starts at $1 million. People who are not billionaires can feel ambushed by that threshold. That feeling is real.
The column takes that real feeling and builds a misleading story on top of it.
Jenkin cites the 2026 federal estate-tax exclusion: $15 million per individual. Then he says eliminating stepped-up basis would catch the plumber’s children. But the plumber who sells his shop for $1.5 million and dies with a $1.2 million estate is not facing federal estate tax under current law. The estate is below the exclusion. The estate tax is not the issue.
The capital-gains question is separate. Under current law, heirs generally receive appreciated property with a basis reset to its value at death. A family home bought in 1985 for $80,000 and worth $800,000 can pass without federal capital-gains tax on that $720,000 appreciation at the owner’s death. That is a real loophole. But it is a tax on unrealized gain, not an estate tax on the house.
Jenkin slides between selling the business and passing it to the children as though they were the same event. They are not. The plumber selling the shop may face a higher tax on the gain from the sale. The children inheriting the shop or home confront a different question: whether accumulated appreciation should disappear from the tax code merely because the owner died.
Conflating the two lets Jenkin make the $15 million exclusion look small and the $1 million threshold look like a trapdoor.
It is neither. It is a threshold. Thresholds can be badly designed, but they are not mysterious.
The Social Security argument gets closer to honest. Jenkin says El-Sayed wants to remove the $184,500 wage cap. A worker earning $1 million would then pay another 6.2 percent in employee Social Security tax—roughly $50,000 more a year—with the employer paying another $50,000. That math is right. Someone earning $1 million in wages really would pay more.
But here is the part the column leaves out: removing the cap also changes the benefit calculation. Social Security benefits are based on a worker’s highest 35 years of indexed earnings. A worker who pays payroll taxes on more wages can receive a larger future benefit. Treating the new tax as pure loss assumes the new benefit does not exist.
This is not a hidden attack on Main Street. It is the policy working as designed: higher earners pay more and, unless the benefit formula is reformed, receive more back. Raise the cap and reform the benefit formula so the wealthy contribute proportionally without buying an outsized retirement benefit. If Jenkin wants to call that a major tax increase on labor, fine. He should also call the benefit attached to it part of the policy.
The trust argument is weaker still. Jenkin describes trusts used for estate planning, business succession, children, grandchildren, and asset management, as if every trust were simply a family savings account with a threatening label attached. Trusts are not all the same. A trust holding a modest home and retirement assets is not a dynasty structure holding commercial property and generations of appreciated wealth.
The trust itself is not the harm. The question is what the trust owns, who controls it, what tax it avoids, and whether the arrangement turns accumulated wealth into permanent tax-free inheritance. A proposal aimed at that function is not a raid on the local plumber’s rainy-day fund. It is a debate about whether the tax code should keep blessing the conversion of private wealth into hereditary advantage.
That is the sleight of hand. The piece names a plumber with ten trucks and twenty employees. It names a bridal-shop owner. It names an HVAC franchisee. None of them are billionaires. Jenkin wants you to identify with them so you will defend the people who are not in the anecdotes: households with tens of millions in appreciated stock, trust structures holding commercial real estate, and wages high enough that the Social Security cap is a rounding error.
The sympathetic edge case is asked to defend the center.
And the center is not the American dream Jenkin invokes. It is a country in which a handful of billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of households, while younger families struggle to buy the homes and businesses their parents’ generation could once afford. The plumber’s child cannot simply purchase a plumbing company at today’s prices. The billionaire hoard is not a distraction from the American dream. It is what remains after the ladder has been pulled up and everyone is told to admire the view.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather.
So what do we build instead?
Start with a tax code that distinguishes accumulated capital from earned wages. Keep a preferential capital-gains rate for ordinary long-term saving, but raise the rate for gains above $1 million, where the realization is more likely to represent concentrated wealth than a working lifetime’s ordinary income. Keep the estate-tax exemption high and indexed. Exempt the first $2 million of an inheritance per heir. Close the stepped-up-basis loophole for very large estates while protecting the family home and a genuine small business from forced liquidation.
Lift the Social Security cap. Reform the benefit formula. Replace the fantasy that every dollar above $184,500 must receive the same benefit treatment with a system that asks what retirement security is for.
Then use the money to build the things that make the plumber’s life less precarious: universal childcare, public higher education, and healthcare that does not bankrupt a household because somebody got cancer. Let a twenty-year climb end in a dignified retirement. Let the children inherit opportunity rather than merely inherit the asset their parents were lucky enough to buy.
I am not asking you to defend or destroy Abdul El-Sayed’s specific plan. Argue about its design. Argue about its thresholds. Argue about how to protect a one-time business sale without preserving a permanent dynasty of untaxed appreciation.
But stop calling a $1 million threshold a theft before asking what the $1 million represents.
The op-ed wants you scared of the plumber’s one-time sale. Be scared of the trillions held by the people who never have to sell at all.