Tax that Yass: Advocates call for Pa. billionaires tax in this year’s budget

Advocates believe that Gov. Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania lawmakers can raise close to $7 billion and backfill President Donald Trump’s budget cuts by taxing the state’s billionaires. 

With Gov. Josh Shapiro preparing to deliver his fourth budget address on Tuesday, advocates and lawmakers are calling on him and Democrats to include a billionaires tax in this year’s budget negotiations. 

“ Because of our flat tax rates, because of things like the corporate loophole, working people bare the larger brunt of funding our public goods in Pennsylvania, and it’s long overdue for us to do something about that,” State Rep. Rick Krajewski told The Keystone. 

Data compiled from Americans for Tax Fairness show that Pennsylvania billionaires raked in a staggering $18 billion following President Donald Trump’s return to office. 

Nearly 90% of that income went to Jeffrey Yass, Pennsylvania’s richest billionaire and one of the country’s largest Republican mega-donors. The billionaire saw his net worth increase by $16 billion, or roughly 32%, from $49.6 billion to $65.5 billion.

“ We have these looming Medicaid and Medicare cuts facing us,” Krajewski said. “We’ve also had all these other funding challenges around funding public transportation, funding schools, [and] funding affordable housing. So we need new investments and new revenue on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, and this is an opportunity to bring that needed revenue.”

Pennsylvania’s constitution forbids a graduated progressive income tax on wealthier residents so lawmakers will have to get creative to backfill $2 billion in federal cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” 

“ I wouldn’t say it’s going around the Constitution, but I would say it is being creative about the limitations we have,” Krajewski said. “Understanding that we have to have flax tax rates, how can we use our current limitations constitutionally to still be creative about increasing revenue from certain sources of income that are not being taxed as progressively as they could be?”

He added, “ Updating the passive income tax in our proposal around that is a creative way to create progressive taxation within our constitutional limitations.”

Krajewski and other Democrats in the Pennsylvania House introduced a series of legislation that could raise close to $7 billion for the upcoming 2026-2027 budget. 

Those bills include: 

• House Bill 1610, which would close corporate tax loopholes and raise $1.5 billion 
• House Bill 1678, which would make social media and tech companies pay for social media ads, raising $500 million.
• Proposed legislation that would tax billionaires’ unearned income, generating $4.8 billion. 

Raquel Jackson-Stone with One Pennsylvania said that all eyes will be on Shapiro and lawmakers to get this done.

“The working people of PA deserve better, and we’ll be watching next week, and all budget season, to see who is prioritized in this budget: hardworking Pennsylvania families, or wealthy billionaires and corporations who profit off a broken and rigged tax system,” she said in a statement.