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'The World Is Watching': Top Economist Rips Newsom for Working to Tank Billionaire Wealth Tax
"You have chosen to protect California's billionaires at the expense of Californians' health," said Gabriel Zucman.
Jun 22, 2026
A world-renowned economist and expert on wealth inequality castigated California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday for working to kill a proposed tax on billionaire fortunes in the Golden State, warning that the Democratic leader and likely 2028 candidate appears bent on handing President Donald Trump "an unexpected ideological and political victory."
Gabriel Zucman, a research professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed to a recent Bloomberg story detailing Newsom's "last-ditch pressure campaign" to prevent a healthcare union-led initiative from appearing on California voters' ballots in November. Last week, organizers announced that they had collected the number of signatures required to get the initiative—a one-time, 5% tax on the wealth of California billionaires—on the ballot ahead of the June 25 deadline.
In a lengthy thread posted to X on Monday, Zucman wrote that he is "shocked" by Newsom's "efforts to defend Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg at the expense of Californians' health," referring to two of the state's most prominent billionaires. Thiel has donated millions to an industry group looking to defeat the ballot initiative, which would use revenue from the wealth tax to offset the impacts of federal Medicaid cuts approved last year by Trump and congressional Republicans.
"Yet you are now devoting all your energy to preventing this ballot initiative from taking place and denying Californians the opportunity to express their democratic will this November," Zucman wrote. "You have chosen to protect California's billionaires at the expense of Californians' health."
By stridently opposing the proposed billionaire tax in California, the economist warned, Newsom is lending credence to "familiar conservative arguments against taxing great fortunes: the threat of capital flight, tax avoidance, harm to growth, etc."
"Instead of reinforcing these arguments, you could have chosen to challenge them. Take the risk of tax flight, a classic objection. It is effectively nonexistent," Zucman wrote. "Beyond the ideological victory you risk handing Trump, you may also be giving him a political victory."
Politically, Zucman warned Newsom that his opposition to the proposed wealth tax—which has proven extremely popular among likely Democratic voters—risks giving Trump and his right-wing allies a political victory by blunting momentum for a wealth tax not only in California, but beyond as well.
"If the 'Yes' prevails, California's tax could quickly inspire similar efforts in other states," Zucman argued. "Ultimately, that process could pave the way for a federal tax on extreme wealth. This is precisely what happened more than a century ago with the progressive income tax."
"The world is watching," the economist added. "In the struggle between democracy and oligarchy, one must choose a side. I hope you will choose ours."
Zucman has been outspoken in support of the proposed wealth tax in California, writing in The New York Times' op-ed pages last month alongside fellow economist Emmanuel Saez that the proposed levy would "be tiny relative to billionaires’ recent wealth gains."
"In the past three years alone, the total wealth of California’s billionaires grew by a staggering 144%, to over $2 trillion," the economists wrote. "Critics of the ballot measure have voiced concerns that even a small number of billionaires leaving the state would lead to lower state tax revenues overall. Their math doesn’t add up. California’s billionaires currently pay such a low tax rate that even if all of them left the state, it would take 25 years for the loss of their tax payments under the current set of rules to surpass the amount the state would raise if the one-time tax succeeds this fall."
"Defending 200 billionaires at the expense of the millions of Californians who will lose healthcare absent the passage of a billionaire tax is not a tenable position for the governor or the state of California."
Last week, organizers of the wealth tax initiative offered to withdraw its proposal if Newsom threw his support behind legislation imposing a 2% tax on California's billionaires—a compromise plan that the governor swiftly rejected.
"The governor supports making the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share, but this poorly designed state-only measure will defund teachers, schools, clinics, and public safety," said Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos. "Changing the tax rate doesn't change this measure's fundamental flaws that harm working Californians."
Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West—the union leading the ballot initiative—hit back, accusing Newsom's office of "engaging in Trump-like misinformation tactics, which is sad and indefensible."
"The billionaire tax explicitly funds clinics, hospitals, schools, teachers, and food assistance to the tune of billions," Jimenez said in an emailed statement. "All objective reports have shown that the wealth tax raises billions to fund healthcare, education, and food assistance—and the revenue that will be raised far surpasses any potential income tax erosion—in no small part because billionaires pay very little relative income tax."
"Defending 200 billionaires at the expense of the millions of Californians who will lose healthcare absent the passage of a billionaire tax is not a tenable position for the governor or the state of California," Jimenez added.
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'Keep Digging': Progressives Welcome Jeff Bezos' Entrance Into Tax-the-Billionaires Debate
"The political danger in Bezos’ argument" to eliminate income taxes for the bottom 50% of American earners, said one op-ed, "is that it lets billionaires sound generous while leaving the structure of wealth largely untouched."
May 22, 2026
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' decision to wade into the tax the rich debate raised eyebrows Thursday, as progressives who have long demanded a wealth tax for billionaires said they'd be happy to include him in the ongoing discussion about how the US tax system can be reformed to benefit working people.
In an interview with CNBC this week, the world's fourth-richest person claimed that doubling his taxes would do nothing to help working people, and attempted to shift the conversation on the tax system to a proposal that the bottom 50% of earners in the US should pay nothing in income taxes.
“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens," said Bezos. "I promise you.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani replied, "I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ." The democratic socialist has been relentlessly focused on making the city more affordable for working people and last month announced his plan to tax second homes valued at more than $5 million.
Critics of Bezos were quick to point out this week that the 1% effective tax rate the billionaire paid between 2014-18 was due to his avoidance of the income tax that working Americans have to pay, with the executive "offsetting earned income with other investment losses and various deductions."
Progressive leaders like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have argued that billionaires including Bezos pay a lower effective tax rate than working people because a vast amount of their wealth comes from unrealized capital gains and other investments instead of income from labor.
Bezos has also not faced a tax on his immense overall wealth of $275.4 billion, which US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives have long called for, saying that taxing a relatively tiny amount of the assets held by billionaires like Bezos, Tesla founder and President Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk, and other tech and business executives could fund essential services for the rest of society—including many that have contributed to the affordability crisis for working families.
"Let's have that debate" regarding reforms to the US tax system, Sanders said Thursday evening, addressing Bezos on Musk's platform X.
The senator has proposed a 5% annual wealth tax, which he said would leave Bezos still sitting on $269 billion in total wealth, while providing enough revenue to fund guaranteed universal childcare, an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for senior citizens, a nationwide starting salary of $60,000 per year for public school teachers, and more.
In his interview with CNBC and on social media this week, Bezos repeatedly attempted to shift attention away from his taxes and onto the income taxes paid by the bottom 50% of earners, claiming that the "top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes."
"The United States has the most progressive tax system in the world," he asserted. "We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group."
Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, who has also called for a wealth tax and last month co-authored a Guardian op-ed with Mamdani explaining how the regressive tax system of the US has helped ensure the top 0.0001% of the global population holds the equivalent of 16% of the world's wealth, said Bezos was misrepresenting the conclusions of global economists regarding the US system.
"Your claim that the top 1% pays 40% of taxes and the bottom 50% only 3% is misleading: It captures just one tax—the federal income tax—and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive," said Zucman.
Bezos continued debating the issue on social media on Wednesday, sharing an article that explained how numerous analyses have determined he has paid an effective tax rate hovering around 1%.
"Great to see Bezos keeps bringing up his own massive tax avoidance. Keep digging! This travesty needs a real public debate," said historian Rutger Bregman, sharing a graph from Zucman's research, which shows how the average tax rate of the richest Americans has plummeted in recent decades.
At Newsweek on Wednesday, the magazine's editors wrote that Bezos was correct in his CNBC interview that "one billionaire's larger tax bill will not fund a modern state by itself."
"The deeper issue is whether the tax system asks comparable civic seriousness from wages, capital gains, inheritances, consumption, and payroll," wrote the editors. "A nurse's paycheck is easy to tax because it is visible. A billionaire's wealth can grow through assets that may remain untaxed until sale, or perhaps sheltered safely in some offshore domain."
"The political danger in Bezos’ argument" to allow the bottom 50% of American earners to pay nothing in income tax, the editors added, "is that it lets billionaires sound generous while leaving the structure of wealth largely untouched."
Thom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report said Bezos' push to eliminate income taxes for a huge swath of Americans benefits him and other billionaires in three ways, while ultimately harming those he claims to be trying to help save money:
First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since [former President Ronald] Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.
Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”
If we just got rid of—or privatized/profitized—all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.
Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.
Hartmann highlighted Bezos' resistance to a wealth tax and a fair tax rate with an anecdote about "a very wealthy German businessman" he once saw interviewed by an American reporter on Bloomberg News.
The businessman asked the reporter "how he could possibly live in a country" that taxes "very wealthy and successful people" at about 60%.
"Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country."
In contrast, Hartmann wrote, "the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks."
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Economist Explains '$100-$150 Billion Per Year' Reason Trump Kidnapped Maduro
"The real goal of the Trump operation lies elsewhere: reclaiming Venezuela’s oil rents for the benefit of America’s economic elite."
Jan 05, 2026
A leading international economist said Sunday that the US invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its socialist leader are about reasserting control over the world's largest petroleum reserves by Washington imperialists and Wall Street shareholders.
Gabriel Zucman—a professor at the Paris School of Economics and University of California, Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy—said on his Substack that the US invasion is motivated by the "$100–$150 billion per year to be captured by US shareholders of oil companies, should a new regime friendly to US interests take power in Caracas."
President Donald Trump and other senior US officials have openly vowed to seize Venezuela's oil, even while claiming that Saturday's invasion and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife are about bringing Maduro to justice on dubious criminal charges, combating narco-trafficking, and protecting US national security.
"Maduro was a brutal and corrupt autocrat," Zucman, who also directs the independent EU Tax Observatory, continued. "But Trump has never had any trouble working with brutal and corrupt autocrats; such traits rarely trouble him."
Indeed, the Trump administration have provided military, financial, or diplomatic support to some of the world's most prolific human rights violators, from the Gulf monarchies to Egypt's military rulers to a sadistic dynasty in Equatorial Guinea and dictatorships in Central Asian countries including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. All of the aforementioned nations sit atop major oil and natural gas deposits.
"The real goal of the Trump operation lies elsewhere: reclaiming Venezuela’s oil rents for the benefit of America’s economic elite—an arrangement that peaked in the 1950s," Zucman asserted, referring to a period in which then-Venezuelan President Marcos Pérez Jiménez ruled the country with an iron fist and was backed by Washington, largely because he let foreign oil companies exploit Venezuela's vast petroleum resources.
"In 1957, at the peak of this extractive regime, profits earned by US oil companies in Venezuela were roughly equal to the profits earned by all US multinationals—across all industries—in the rest of Latin America and in continental European countries combined," he continued.
"About 12% of Venezuela’s net domestic product—the value of everything produced in the country each year—flowed directly to the pockets of US shareholders," Zucman noted. "That was roughly the same amount of income received by the poorest half of the Venezuelan population combined."
"This is the 'golden age' the Trump administration wants to bring back: a sharing of oil rents that is difficult to imagine being more unequal," he added.
Critics have accused the US of waging war for oil for nearly a century. US administrations have explicitly asserted the right to use military force to safeguard control of access to petroleum resources since the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The George W. Bush administration even initially called its impending invasion and occupation of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Liberation," before changing it so the abbreviation did not spell "OIL."
While Trump campaigned on the promise of no new wars and claims to avoid giving world leaders "lectures on how to live," he has now ordered the bombing of more nations than any US president in history. All 10 countries attacked by Trump since 2017—Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen—are oil producers or possess significant fossil fuel resources.
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Top French Economist Says Ex-Prime Ministers Should Have Embraced Wealth Tax
"This blocking attitude is at the heart of the budget crisis and also, as a result, of the current political crisis," said Gabriel Zucman after another French prime minister resigned.
Oct 07, 2025
On the heels of France losing yet another prime minister, Politico on Tuesday published an interview in which world-renowned French economist Gabriel Zucman argued that the recently departed leaders should have supported his proposed wealth tax.
Zucman, who leads the EU Tax Observatory and teaches at French and US universities, has advocated for imposing a wealth tax of at least 2% for the ultrarich in France and around the world. However, Sébastien Lecornu, who resigned as prime minister on Monday, after less than a month in office, did not embrace that approach, the economist noted.
Former Prime Minister François Bayrou also didn't support the "Zucman tax." He was in the post when the French National Assembly voted in favor of a 2% minimum tax on wealth exceeding €100 million, or $117 million, in February—and when the Senate ultimately rejected the policy in June. He resigned in early September, after losing a no-confidence vote.
Before both of them, Michel Barnier was prime minister. He resigned last December, also after losing a no-confidence vote. He, too, didn't embrace the tax policy, despite polling that shows, as Zucman put it, "there is a very strong demand among the population for greater tax fairness and better taxation of the ultrarich."
"The executive has so far remained completely deaf to both parliamentary work and popular democratic demands," Zucman told Politico's Giorgio Leali. "They didn't try to have a real dialogue with the opposition on this."
"The very wealthy individuals affected by this measure, and the media outlets they own, have spoken out very vehemently on the subject in an attempt to discourage the government from engaging in any form of reflection or discussion," he added.
On social media, Leali shared a quote from Zucman tying the former prime ministers' attitudes on the tax proposal and broader budget fight to the country's current political crisis—in which "increasingly isolated" President Emmanuel Macron faces pressure from across France's political spectrum to hold a snap parliamentary election or resign.
As Reuters reported Tuesday, "Resignation calls, long confined to the fringes, have entered the mainstream during one of the worst political crises since the 1958 creation of the Fifth Republic, France's current system of government."
Even Édouard Philippe—who, as France 24 noted, was "Macron's longest-serving prime minister from 2017 to 2020"—is urging him to step down, saying that the president must help France "emerge in an orderly and dignified manner from a political crisis that is harming the country."
After the anti-austerity "Block Everything" protests across France on September 10, Mathilde Panot of the leftist party La France Insoumise (LFI) announced that 100 members of Parliament endorsed a motion to impeach Macron.
LFI founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Monday that "following the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, we call for the immediate consideration of the motion tabled by 104 MPs for the impeachment of Emmanuel Macron."
"Emmanuel Macron is responsible for the political chaos," he said, calling out "those in power" for failing to respond to not only the demonstrations on September 10 but also the union mobilizations on September 18 and October 2.
"The president is rejected by public opinion, which desires his departure, and he has lost the support of ALL the parties in his political coalition," Mélenchon added Tuesday. "Why does he remain? A return to coherence for the country requires his departure and a return to the voice of the people."
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2% Wealth Tax on Just 3,000 Billionaires Could Raise $250 Billion a Year: Nobel Economists
"Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible."
Jul 07, 2025
Seven Nobel laureates on Monday published an op-ed advocating for "a minimum tax for the ultrarich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth," in the French newspaper Le Monde.
"They have never been so wealthy and yet contribute very little to the public coffers: From Bernard Arnault to Elon Musk, billionaires have significantly lower tax rates than the average taxpayer," wrote Daron Acemoglu, George Akerlof, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Citing pioneering research from the E.U. Tax Observatory, the renowned economists noted that "ultrawealthy individuals pay around 0% to 0.6% of their wealth in income tax. In a country like the United States, their effective tax rate is around 0.6%, while in a country like France, it is closer to 0.1%."
Although the "ultrawealthy can easily structure their wealth to avoid income tax, which is supposed to be the cornerstone of tax justice," the strategies for doing so differ by region, the experts detailed. Europeans often use family holding companies that are banned in the United States, "which explains why the wealthy are more heavily taxed there than in Europe—though some have still managed to find workarounds."
The good news is that "there is no inevitability here. Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible," argued the economists, who say that taxing the overall wealth of the ultrarich, not just income, is the key.
The wealth tax approach, they wrote, "is effective because it targets all forms of tax optimization, whatever their nature. It is targeted, as it applies only to the wealthiest taxpayers, and only to those among them who engage in tax avoidance."
💡 "One of the most promising avenues is to introduce a minimum tax for the ultra-rich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth."Seven Nobel laureates in economics advocate for the Zucman tax in their latest op-ed.Read the full @lemonde.fr article 👇www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...
[image or embed]
— EU Tax Observatory (@taxobservatory.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 8:05 AM
The anticipated impact would be significant. As the op-ed highlights: "Globally, a 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals. In Europe, around $50 billion could be raised. And by extending this minimum rate to individuals with wealth over $100 million, these sums would increase significantly."
That's according to a June 2024 report that French economist and E.U. Tax Observatory director Gabriel Zucman prepared for the Group of 20's Brazilian presidency—which was followed by G20 leaders' November commitment to taxing the rich and last month's related proposal from the governments of Brazil, South Africa, and Spain.
"The international movement is underway," the economists declared Monday, also pointing to recent developments on the "Zucman tax" in France. The French National Assembly voted in favor of a 2% minimum tax on wealth exceeding €100 million, or $117 million, in February—but the Senate rejected the measure last month.
The economists urged the European country to keep working at it, writing that "at a time of ballooning public deficits and exploding extreme wealth, the French government must seize the initiative approved by the National Assembly. There is no reason to wait for an international agreement to be finalized—on the contrary, France should lead by example, as it has done in the past," when it was the first country to introduce a value-added tax (VAT).
"As for the risk of tax exile, the bill passed by the National Assembly provides that taxpayers would remain subject to the minimum tax for five years after leaving the country," they wrote. "The government could go further and propose extending this period to 10 years, which would likely reduce the risk of expatriation even more."
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Top 19 'Truly Superwealthy' US Families Grew $1 Trillion Richer Last Year: Analysis
Families including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg now control a combined $2.6 trillion in wealth, according to renowned economist Gabriel Zucman.
Apr 23, 2025
A new analysis by a leading chronicler of the United States' exploding inequality shows that the 19 richest American households added $1 trillion to their collective fortunes last year and saw their share of the nation's wealth jump at a record-shattering pace.
The analysis by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the 19 wealthiest U.S. families now control 1.8%—or $2.6 trillion—of the nation's total household wealth.
In 2024, those ultrarich households saw the largest single-year wealth increase on record.
The Wall Street Journal noted in its Wednesday write-up of Zucman's analysis—based on data from Forbes, Fortune, and the Federal Reserve—that the families in his "research on the top 0.00001% in the U.S. are worth at least $45 billion per household and include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and private-equity investor Stephen Schwarzman."
Their wealth is largely tied up in the U.S. stock market, which rose more than 23% in 2024. The richest 10% of U.S. households control 93% of stock market wealth, according to the Federal Reserve.
(Source: Gabriel Zucman via The Wall Street Journal)
Zucman, whose analysis dates back to 1913, told the Journal that the U.S. has recently seen a "dramatic acceleration in the rise of the share of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy"—a trend that would continue if President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress pass tax legislation largely benefiting the rich.
"If there's one glimmer of hope it is this," Zucman wrote on social media last month, pointing to a packed "Fighting Oligarchy" rally held in Denver by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"There is a strong anti-oligarchic current in America, and it has a formidable champion," Zucman added. "Fight!"
The Journal reported Wednesday that "a household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average of $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars."
"In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average of $450,000 per household, per year," the Journal added.
Meanwhile, families at the bottom of the U.S. income and wealth distribution have struggled due to what the Economic Policy Institute recently described as "policy-induced wage suppression."
A February working paper by the think tank RAND estimated that the bottom 90% of U.S. workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more in 2023 alone had the income distribution been more even rather than flowing disproportionately to the top.
"Since 1975, nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%," Sanders said last month in response to the paper. "The massive income and wealth inequality in America today is not only morally unjust, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy."
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When It Comes to Taxing the Rich, France’s National Assembly Is Leading the Way
Assembly lawmakers have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth at a time when the most powerful nation on Earth—the United States—is moving in the exact opposite direction.
Mar 12, 2025
Nine of the world’s 10 wealthiest billionaires now call the United States home. The remaining one? He lives in France. And that one—Bernard Arnault, the 76-year-old who owns just about half the world’s largest maker of luxury goods—is now feeling some heat.
What has Arnault and his fellow French deep pockets beginning to sweat? Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth.
“The tax impunity of billionaires,” the measure’s prime sponsor, the Ecologist Party’s Eva Sas, exulted last month, “is over.”
The annual tax on grand fortune that the assembly’s lawmakers have passed, says the UC-Berkeley analyst Gabriel Zucman, represents “amazing progress” that has the potential to set a bold new global precedent.
Sas had good reason for exulting. In the French National Assembly debate over whether to start levying a 2% annual tax on wealth over 100 million euros—the equivalent of $108 million—the leader of the chamber’s hands-off-our-rich lawmakers introduced 26 amendments designed to undercut this landmark tax-the-rich initiative. All 26 of these amendments failed.
But France’s 4,000 or so deep pockets worth over 100 million euros—the nation’s richest 0.01%—don’t have to open up their checkbooks just quite yet. The French Senate’s right-wing-majority has no intention of backing the National Assembly’s new levy, and, even if the Senate did, France’s highest court would most likely dismiss the measure.
French president Emmanuel Macron, for his part, has spent most of the last decade cutting corporate tax rates and axing taxes on investment assets. And his budget minister has blasted last month’s National Assembly tax-the-rich move as both “confiscatory and ineffective.”
None of this opposition, believes the French economist who inspired the National Assembly’s new tax move, should give us cause to doubt that move’s significance. The annual tax on grand fortune that the assembly’s lawmakers have passed, says the UC-Berkeley analyst Gabriel Zucman, represents “amazing progress” that has the potential to set a bold new global precedent.
What makes the National Assembly’s tax legislation even more significant? That tax-the-rich vote has come at a time when the most powerful nation on Earth—the United States—is moving in the exact opposite direction. The new Trump administration, with the help of the world’s single richest individual, is now busily hollowing out the tax-the-rich capacity of the Internal Revenue Service.
President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had actually made some serious moves to enhance that IRS capacity, hiring—before he left office—thousands of new tax staffers. But those new hires, notes a ProPublica analysis, have now started going through Elon Musk’s “DOGE” meat grinder.
Team Trump’s ultimate goal at the tax agency? To use layoffs, attrition, and buyouts to cut the overall IRS workforce “by as much as half,” The Associated Press reports. A reduction in force that severe, charges former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, would render the IRS “dysfunctional.”
The prime target of the ongoing IRS cutbacks: the agency’s Large Business and International office, the IRS division that specializes in auditing America’s highest-income individuals and the companies they run.
On average, researchers have concluded over recent years, every dollar the IRS spends auditing America’s richest ends up returning as much as $12 in new tax revenue. The current gutting of the agency’s most skilled staffers, tax analysts have told ProPublica, “will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.”
Moves to “hamstring the IRS,” sums up former IRS Commissioner Koskinen, amount to “just a tax cut for tax cheats.”
Donald Trump, agrees the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Amy Hanauer, “is waging economic war on the vast majority of Americans, pushing to further slash taxes on the wealthiest and corporations, while sapping the public services that keep our communities strong.”
Public services like Social Security. Elon Musk has lately taken to deriding America’s most beloved federal program as a “Ponzi scheme,” and the Social Security Administration’s new leadership team, suitably inspired, has just announced plans to trim some 7,000 jobs from an agency “already at a 50-year staffing low.”
A vicious economic squeeze on America’s seniors. A massive tax-time giveaway for America’s richest. How can we start reversing those sorts of inequality-inducing dynamics? The veteran retirement analyst Teresa Ghilarducci has one fascinating suggestion.
Any individual’s annual earnings over $176,100 will this year, Ghilarducci points out, face not a dime of Social Security tax. A CEO making millions of dollars a year will pay no more in Social Security tax than a civil engineer making a mere $176,100.
If lawmakers removed that arbitrary $176,100 Social Security tax cap and subjected more categories of income—like capital gains—to Social Security tax, Ghilarducci reflects, we could ensure Social Security’s viability for decades to come and even make giant strides to totally ending poverty among all Social Security recipients.
And if we had just merely eliminated the Social Security tax cap on annual earnings in 2023, the most recent stats show, America’s 229 top earners would have paid more into Social Security that year than the 77% of American workers who took home under $57,000.
We could also apply Ghilarducci’s zesty tax-the-rich spirit to the broader global economy, as the inspiration behind France’s recent tax-the-rich moves, the economist Gabriel Zucman, has just observed in a piece that cleverly suggests “tariffs for oligarchs.’
The fortunes of our super rich, Zucman reminds us, “depend on access to global markets,” a reality that could leave these rich vulnerable at tax time. Nations subject to Trump’s new tariffs, he goes on to explain, could retaliate by taking an imaginative approach to taxing Corporate America’s super rich.
“In other words,” Zucman notes, “if Tesla wants to sell cars in Canada and Mexico, Elon Musk—Tesla’s primary shareholder—should be required to pay taxes in those jurisdictions.”
Taking that approach “could trigger a virtuous cycle.” The super rich would soon find relocating either their firms or their fortunes to low-tax jurisdictions a pointless endeavor. Any savings they might reap from such moves would get offset by the higher taxes they would owe in nations with major markets.
The current economic “race to the bottom,” Zucman quips, could essentially become “a race to the top” that “neutralizes tax competition, fights inequality, and protects our planet.”
Lawmakers in France have just shown they’re willing to start racing in that top-oriented direction. May their inspiration spread.
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Top Economist Has Winning Idea for Trump's Trade War: Tariffs for US Oligarchs
"If it's a trade war Trump wants, consumers in Mexico, Canada, Europe, and beyond should unite to ensure that Musk and his fellow oligarchs feel the cost."
Mar 03, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump weighed 25% tariffs he plans to impose on Canada and Mexico on Monday, with the White House sending mixed messages in recent days about when the levies will go into effect, a top progressive economist has proposed foreign countries should respond to "the trade war Trump seems determined to stoke" by targeting the "Achilles heel" embedded in the Trump administration.
"Mexico, Canada, and Europe have leverage," wrote Gabriel Zucman, director of the E.U. Tax Observatory, in a column Friday, pointing to the country's "highly internationalized oligarchy: a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals whose fortunes depend on access to global markets."
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick indicated Monday morning that Trump has yet to decide whether tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports—including produce, lumber, vehicles, and electronics—will go forward just after midnight on Tuesday as previously planned; the president has also recently said the tariffs could be delayed until April 2.
But Zucman wrote that whenever the policy does enter force, Canada, Mexico, and any other countries affected "should retaliate by taxing U.S. oligarchs."
Powerful business owners like Tesla CEO Elon Musk—now also spearheading Trump's gutting of federal agencies through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all rely on markets outside of the U.S. to enrich their companies, which "gives foreign governments influence," Zucman continued.
"If Tesla wants to sell cars in Canada and Mexico, Elon Musk—Tesla's primary shareholder—should be required to pay taxes in those jurisdictions," he wrote. "Of course, this strategy is explicitly extraterritorial, since it applies tax obligations on foreign actors in exchange for access to local markets. But rather than fearing extraterritoriality, countries should embrace it as a tool for enforcing minimum standards, curbing inequality, preventing tax evasion, and promoting sustainability."
Tariffs on oligarchs could fight against Trump's attacks on environmental regulations, push for tax giveaways to billionaires at the cost of crucial public services, and advocacy for re-segregating workplaces, suggested Zucman, while shifting "the economic conflict from a battle between countries—which fuels nationalist tensions and economic retaliation—to one between consumers and oligarchs."
Countries could also "collect taxes that multinationals have dodged elsewhere, gradually eroding the appeal of tax competition" and triggering a "virtuous cycle," added the economist, who focuses on wealth inequality and international tax policy.
With tariffs on oligarchs in place, he said, firms would no longer be incentivized to move to countries that hand out corporate tax breaks because their savings would be offset by the tariffs levied by countries with large markets.
Governments have been accused in taking part in a "race to the bottom" as they try to attract large multinational companies run by some of the richest people in the world, with huge tax breaks that weaken "national safety nets, [kill] jobs by subsidising capital at the expense of labor, [allow] elites to escape the rule of law, and [reduce] productivity and economic growth," as the Tax Justice Network wrote in a 2020 report.
With tariffs for oligarchs, said Zucman "the race to the bottom would soon be replaced by a race to the top."
While the first weeks of Trump's second term in the White House have raised fears over a looming trade war, attacks on immigrants and transgender Americans, mass firings of federal workers, and the United States' withdrawal from international agreements and organizations, Zucman said the Trump presidency "also presents an opportunity."
"This is a moment to rethink international economic relations, calmly but radically," wrote Zucman. "The best response is a new global economic framework that neutralizes tax competition, fights inequality, and protects our planet. Under such a framework, importing countries would enforce tax justice beyond their borders, ensuring that multinational corporations and their billionaire owners pay their fair share."
"If it's a trade war Trump wants," he said, "consumers in Mexico, Canada, Europe, and beyond should unite to ensure that Musk and his fellow oligarchs feel the cost."
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G20 Leaders Reach 'Landmark Commitment' for Global Tax on Ultrarich
"Now is the time to turn words into action and launch an inclusive international negotiation, extending beyond G20 countries, on the reform of the taxation of the superrich," said economist Gabriel Zucman.
Nov 19, 2024
Acknowledging that "the era of the billionaire" is still in full swing across the globe, economic justice advocates on Tuesday applauded a "landmark commitment" by G20 leaders at the group's annual summit in Rio de Janeiro, where delegates agreed to cooperate on efforts to ensure the richest households in the world are taxed fairly.
The final communiqué out of the G20 Summit includes a commitment from 19 countries, the European Union, and the African Union, to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed."
"Cooperation could involve exchanging best practices, encouraging debates around tax principles, and devising anti-avoidance mechanisms, including addressing potentially harmful tax practices," reads the communiqué. "We look forward to continuing to discuss these issues in the G20 and other relevant forums, counting on the technical inputs of relevant international organizations, academia, and experts."
The final text was brokered by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, and the E.U. Tax Observatory noted that Argentina's right-wing president, Javier Milei, "failed to convince other G20 countries to block the communiqué."
The meeting took place less than a year after economist Gabriel Zucman, director of the E.U. Tax Observatory, published a report titled A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals, which informed G20 finance discussions leading up to the summit.
"A minimum tax on billionaires equal to 2% of their wealth would raise $200-$250 billion per year globally from about 3,000 taxpayers; extending the tax to centimillionaires would add $100-$140 billion," said Zucman, a leading expert on tax avoidance and reducing inequality, in the report.
Billionaires' effective tax rate is currently equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth, requiring them to pay a far lower rate than middle-class taxpayers.
Zucman hailed the agreement out of the summit in Rio de Janeiro as a "historic decision" and said concrete action by the world's governments must follow.
"Now is the time to turn words into action and launch an inclusive international negotiation, extending beyond G20 countries, on the reform of the taxation of the superrich," said Zucman.
Along with Milei, the Biden administration pushed back this year as the G20 weighed Zucman's tax proposal. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told The Wall Street Journal in May that the "notion of some common global arrangement for taxing billionaires with proceeds redistributed in some way—we're not supportive of a process to try to achieve that. That's something we can't sign on to."
As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, the U.S. is one of eight countries that are contributing to an international loss of $492 billion in taxes each year as multinational corporations and ultrawealthy individuals underpay. The eight countries—which also include Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the U.K.—oppose a United Nations tax convention.
Jenny Ricks, general secretary of the Fight Inequality Alliance, said that particularly with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump set to take office in January, "we live in the era of the billionaire."
"We need to move to the era of the 99%," said Ricks. "This shift won't come easily. The U.S. elections have shown how the superrich can use their wealth and power to influence policies and shape the outcomes of elections. Leaders like Trump in the U.S. and Javier Milei in Argentina are actively working to derail international cooperation, while politicians around the world fail to oppose the vested interests that continue to benefit from such unequal societies."
"We will fight harder than ever before to transform the rhetoric on taxing the rich into a global reality," she added. "We need more equal societies in which the richest no longer hold all the power and wealth, with devastating consequences. We need to redistribute the wealth of the superrich to fund vital public services and the response to climate change. Such a transformation is essential to creating the alternative we seek to today's broken system."
Viviana Santiago, executive director of Oxfam Brazil, applauded Lula's government and the G20 leaders for responding "to people's demands worldwide to tackle extreme inequality, hunger, and climate breakdown, and particularly for rallying action on taxing the superrich."
"G20 governments deserve praise for their groundbreaking commitment to cooperate on taxing the world's superrich. But we won't rest until this delivers real change for people and planet," said Santiago, adding that governments now ostensibly supporting a tax on billionaires' wealth should also "be championing a $5 trillion climate finance goal at COP29," the U.N. summit set to wrap up in Baku, Azerbaijan this week.
"How can they argue that climate justice is unaffordable with a deal to raise trillions of dollars by taxing the superrich on the table?" she asked.
Quentin Parrinello, policy director at the E.U. Tax Observatory, asserted that negotiations on the tax proposal "must now extend to a much more inclusive space than the G20."
"Such reforms don't happen overnight, but time is pressing," said Parrinello. "This agenda is even more important today, with the risk of geopolitical fragmentation and looming wealth concentration fueling inequality and undermining democracy."
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NYT Gives 'Whining' Megadonors a Platform to Push Harris Against Taxing the Rich
"I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you that Wall Street billionaires and Silicon Valley tech bros are trying to convince a presidential candidate to abandon her commitment to tax them," said the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.
Aug 30, 2024
The United States' "paper of record" gave ultra-rich investors and corporate executives a platform on Thursday to sound off against Vice President Kamala Harris' support for a tax on unrealized capital gains, a popular proposal that has stirred howls of complaint from Silicon Valley elites whom Harris used to represent in the Senate.
The New York Times story—headlined "Donors Quietly Push Harris to Drop Tax on Ultrawealthy"—quotes billionaire investor Mark Cuban; Aaron Levie, CEO of the cloud storage firm Box; Charles Myers, the founder of Signum Global Advisors; and others who have backed Harris' presidential bid.
"In my interactions with them, the key is she focuses on her values and is not an ideologue about any particular program," Cuban told the Times, which described him as one of the donors close to Harris who doesn't "believe she is that committed" to taxing billionaire wealth.
"From what I've been told," said Cuban, "everything is on the table, nothing's been decided yet."
Levie, who has donated $30,000 to Harris' campaign, said Silicon Valley leaders he has spoken with about the proposed tax on unrealized capital gains see the idea as "quite punitive."
"There's optimism that this can't possibly be real," said Levie. "Most people are waiting to hear from the Harris campaign. Is this a real proposal that is actually being pushed for—or was this something that was inherited from Biden?"
"The only thing at stake here is the remarkably fragile egos of billionaires who are on the verge of realizing they might not be saving civilization for anyone, including themselves."
The Times noted Friday that a group of wealthy Harris supporters known as "VCs for Kamala" found in a survey of its members that "roughly 75% of respondents agreed with the statement 'taxing unrealized capital gains will stifle innovation.'" The group includes billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and billionaire investor Chris Sacca.
The Patriotic Millionaires, a group of rich Americans who support higher taxes on the wealthy, issued a statement Friday criticizing both the "whining" megadonors and the Times for handing them a megaphone to attack efforts to rein in billionaire tax dodging.
"I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you that Wall Street billionaires and Silicon Valley tech bros are trying to convince a presidential candidate to abandon her commitment to tax them, and using their own alleged brilliance to justify it," said Morris Pearl, the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires. "I admire their chutzpah in claiming that taxing unrealized capital gains will stifle innovation!"
"Claiming that making a billionaire pay taxes on their second billion will reduce innovation is as absurd as the rooster claiming the sun won't rise without his crowing," Pearl added. "The billionaires I know were all highly motivated to earn their first billion. The only thing at stake here is the remarkably fragile egos of billionaires who are on the verge of realizing they might not be saving civilization for anyone, including themselves."
The Patriotic Millionaires also suggested some adjustments to the Times headline:
Some (Silly/Misinformed) Donors Quietly (although not actually all that quietly; it was reported on the front page of the NYT after all) Push Harris to Drop (Modest Compared to What it Should Be) Tax on Ultra-Wealthy While Other (Much More Sensible and, yes, More Patriotic) Donors Loudly Push Billionaires to Drop Opposition to Common Sense.
The Harris campaign has voiced support for the tax proposals outlined in President Joe Biden's most recent budget blueprint, including a tax on the unrealized capital gains accumulated by individuals with net worths exceeding $100 million—a portion of the nation's upper class that contains fewer than 11,000 people.
Under the nation's current tax structure, billionaires are able to dodge taxes by never or rarely selling stock positions, which are not taxed until they are "realized."
Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a leading advocate of a tax on billionaire wealth, has applauded the Harris campaign for embracing the proposed levy on the unrealized capital gains of the ultra-wealthy.
In a May op-ed in the Times, Zucman noted that U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history in 2018.
"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote at the time. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else."
"In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies," the economist added. "A coordinated minimum tax on the superrich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."
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