A group called Americans for Tax Fairness has tracked the remarkable increase in the wealth of billionaires during the rise of the pandemic.

Shouldn’t billionaires pay higher taxes to help the children of their state? What profiteth a man to gain additional billions if the society he lives in is overrun with starving, unfed, uneducated children?

WASHINGTON—New York has 118 billionaires who collectively saw their wealth increase by $77.3 billion or 14.8% during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic even as the state’s economy was reeling from a huge spike in joblessness and a collapse in taxes collected, a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and Health Care for America Now (HCAN) shows. One new billionaire joined the list during the three-month period bringing the total to 119 billionaires, of whom 113 are U.S. citizens and 6 are foreigners with residences in the state.

New York State is projecting a $13.3 billion revenue shortfall in FY2021, or a 14% decline.

Between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the state’s 119 billionaires rose from $521.5 billion to $600.7 billion, based on an analysis of Forbes data. Forbes’ annual billionaires report was published March 18, 2020, and the most recent real-time data was collected June 17 from the Forbes website.

Three New York billionaires—Michael Bloomberg, Julia Koch and Stephen Schwarzman—saw their wealth grow by 25%, 26% and 27%, respectively. During about the same period of the pandemic, 2,594,000 of the state’s residents lost their jobs, 387,000 fell ill with the virus and 31,000 died from it.

Would it be too much to ask them to pay taxes to support our children and our schools?