Even after the failures of the pandemic, the unions are still focusing on pushing left-wing schemes like wealth taxes instead of educating students.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I t shouldn’t be a surprise that the architects of a new “wealth tax” have hatched yet another scheme to transfer money from those who’ve worked for it to those who didn’t.

What does bear noting, however, is who is supporting the effort: teachers’ unions.

Within the past few weeks, lawmakers in California, New York, Illinois, Maryland, Hawaii, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Washington have unveiled similar tax schemes targeting wealthy residents — even those no longer living there.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Democrats finally have a strategy to stop billionaires from fleeing high tax states: Block the escape routes. That’s the logic behind coordinated moves in progressive states to tax wealth. The reforms aren’t likely to pass immediately, but they illustrate the increasingly open socialist goals of progressives and their public-union backers.

In Washington, for example, state legislators introduced a new tax on the wealthy, ostensibly to supplement government spending on housing, education, disability benefits, and tax credits for working people.

The bills, S.B. 5486 and H.B. 1473, would create a 1 percent property tax its supporters claim would be paid by only a few hundred of the wealthiest people in the state.

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“I know how important it is that we fight for tax justice in Washington state,” said Representative My-Linh Thai (D., Bellevue), sponsor of the bill in the House. “It’s time we start rewarding work rather than wealth.”

Leaving aside the reality that it’s the government’s job to do neither, what distinguishes the Washington plan and those in seven other deep-blue states is the common beneficiary of the hoped-for windfall the new taxes will generate.

In fact, the multistate endeavor was coordinated by Fund Our Future, an advocacy group affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

“As usual,” the Wall Street Journal observes, “public unions are pushing the progressive lawmakers they fund to tap new streams of tax revenue so they can get bigger salaries and pensions.”

Not to mention backfilling the gaping revenue hole left by the public employees who have opted out of union membership and dues in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus ruling that gave them the freedom to do so.

According to U.S. Department of Labor disclosure reports, the National Education Association and AFT lost more than 59,000 working members combined during the 2021-22 school year.

That decline comes after an 82,000-member loss the previous year.

Those declines aren’t because of declining levels of employment overall. On the contrary, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that local schools added 95,000 employees between September 2021 and September 2022.

Nor were the membership losses confined to specific areas of the country. Every state affiliate but one that was required to file a disclosure report lost working members.

Once again, the unions’ problem is one of their own making.

Rather than learning from the mistakes of school closures during the pandemic (which unions supported to the detriment of students) and focusing on education, organized labor and its left-wing allies in government are doubling down on the same failed progressive policies. They should expect more of the same results: dwindling union membership, declining economic competitiveness for their states, and more residents looking for the exits to places such as Florida and Texas.

Even after the failures of the pandemic, and with school choice gaining steam across the country, teachers’ unions are still focusing on pushing left-wing schemes like wealth taxes instead of educating students. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: These organizations couldn’t care less about students and are little more than Democratic political-advocacy groups.