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patriotic millionaires
'Inequality by Design': EU Billionaire Wealth Soared by Over €400 Billion in 6 Months
“Europe is minting billionaires at a record rate while millions of Europeans are struggling to make ends meet," said one tax expert.
Oct 09, 2025
A worsening inequality crisis in the European Union—where the richest people pay proportionately less tax than ordinary citizens even as billionaire wealth is skyrocketing—is driving increasingly popular demand for a wealth tax, according to a report published Thursday.
The Oxfam briefing paper, A European Agenda to Tax the Superrichch, notes that "the richest 1% in the EU own nearly a quarter of all wealth while half the population shares just 3%."
The report underscores that the combined wealth of EU billionaires soared by over €400 billion ($462.2 billion) in just six months this year—the equivalent of over €2 billion ($2.3 billion) a day.
"In 2025, the EU counted nearly 500 billionaires, 39 more than in 2024," Oxfam said. "In the last year alone, a new billionaire was created, on average, every nine days in the EU. Altogether, the richest 3,600 Europeans now hold as much wealth as the poorest 181 million—equivalent to the populations of Germany, Italy, and Spain combined."
“Europe is minting billionaires at a record rate while millions of Europeans are struggling to make ends meet,” Oxfam EU tax expert Chiara Putaturo said in a statement Thursday. “This inequality is not by accident, it is by design.”
📢 EU Billionaires’ wealth surges by over €400bn in first half of 2025.That’s over €2bn a day.🔗https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/eu-billionaires-wealth-surges-over-eu400-billion-first-half-2025#TaxTheRich
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— Oxfam EU (@oxfameu.bsky.social) October 8, 2025 at 10:27 PM
As the report notes:
Over recent decades, EU countries have slashed taxes for the richest people and corporations, while leaving ordinary people to pay the price. Today, over 80% of tax revenue in the EU comes from taxes that fall primarily on ordinary citizens, while the wealthiest can exploit loopholes, tax havens, and special regimes to pay lower effective tax rates than nurses and teachers. In Belgium, for example, members of the richest 1% contribute just 23% tax of their incomes, which is half of what the average person contributes.
"Decades of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations resulted in the superrich paying proportionally less taxes than ordinary citizens, eroding fairness, democracy, and social cohesion," the report states. "The EU lacks harmonized policies to curb extreme wealth concentration and tax avoidance of the wealthiest."
"Oxfam calls for bold reforms, such as an EU-wide or national tax on the superrich and transparency mechanisms like an EU assets registry, to fund social needs, climate action, and development," the publication adds. "Taxing the superrich is widely supported, is feasible, and is urgent."
The report contends that an EU-wide wealth tax of up to 5% on millionaires and billionaires could potentially bring in €286.5 billion ($331.3 billion) in yearly revenue, "enough to cover the annual needs of the new EU long-term budget proposal," while ending "harmful and wasteful" tax policies favoring the superrich would recover nearly €4 billion ($4.6 billion) annually.
While wealth taxes have been proposed in a number of European countries, including France—which according to The Economist has more billionaires than any other country in the EU—only Norway, Spain, and Switzerland have enacted a net wealth tax, according to Tax Foundation Europe.
After France's political crisis deepened this week with the resignation of another prime minister, French economist Gabriel Zucman—known globally for advocating for a wealth tax of at least 2%—called out his country's last three PMs for not taking the proposal seriously. He noted that “there is a very strong demand among the population for greater tax fairness and better taxation of the ultrarich.”
France has more billionaires than any country in the EU. A new tax on their income is a popular idea. But doing so might not bring in all that much cash econ.st/4nkboVU
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— The Economist (@economist.com) September 30, 2025 at 8:00 AM
The Equals podcast and Belgian-Dutch philosopher Ingrid Robeyns on Thursday explored the benefits of a wealth cap.
"The idea of a poverty line is pretty well understood. No one should have so little that they can’t afford a roof over their head or go to bed hungry at night," Equals Bulletin said. "But billions of people around the world can’t afford these basics, despite the wealth increase of billionaires over the last decade being enough to end poverty 22 times over."
Embracing the concept of a wealth cap, the publication explained: "It’s about ensuring the needs of people and planet are met so everyone can flourish. You don’t have to be a communist to agree with a wealth cap, nor does it necessarily mean rejecting a market-based economy."
New EQUALS episode is out.We ask, How Much Wealth is Too Much?Philosopher @ingridrobeyns.bsky.social explains why we need a wealth limit & how billionaires are quietly breaking democracy.🎧 Listen here 👉 www.equals.ink/p/how-much-w...
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— EQUALS (@equalshope.bsky.social) October 7, 2025 at 7:42 AM
How much wealth is too much? Equals cited a New Economics Foundation (NEF)/Patriotic Millionaires survey published earlier this year in which one-third of millionaires said that the "extreme wealth line"—the point beyond which their fortune is considered harmful to society and the environment—should be set at $10 million.
"Society needs novel approaches to bring this complex topic to life," NEF's Fernanda Balata and Hollie Wright said at the time, "including narratives and practical tools more apt to address the vast cultural, moral, economic, and social barriers to tackling extreme wealth."
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Musk's SpaceX Likely Paid 'Little to No Taxes' Despite Lucrative Government Contracts
Patriotic Millionaires, an organization that lobbies for higher taxes on the wealthy, said the report was a "reminder of how unfair our tax code is."
Aug 15, 2025
Although Elon Musk's space exploration company SpaceX has benefited over the years from several lucrative government contracts, it has largely avoided paying any taxes to the federal government.
The New York Times reports that SpaceX has "most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any."
The reason that the company has gotten away with paying practically no taxes, writes the Times, is that it takes advantage of a tax benefit commonly referred to as a net operating loss carryforward "that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income." This tax benefit was initially limited in its scope, but congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump in 2017 scrapped its expiration date for all companies, thus letting SpaceX and other firms take advantage of it indefinitely.
Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, told the Times that this tax benefit was intended to help struggling firms weather tough times to stay in business, but that it was "clearly not intended for a company doing so well" as SpaceX.
In its review of SpaceX's internal documents, the Times found that SpaceX had paid a small amount of taxes over the years, although none of them were to the federal government.
"In one document, the company said it expected to pay $483,000 in income tax to foreign governments and $78,000 in state income tax in 2021," writes the paper. "Separately, it reported paying $6,000 for income taxes in 2020 and 2021, but did not disclose if the payments were for federal, state or local governments."
What makes SpaceX's tax avoidance particularly noteworthy is its own dependence on the federal government for business. In 2020, the Times found, federal contracts accounted for nearly 84% of the firm's total revenues.
Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who advocate for higher taxes on the rich, wrote on X that SpaceX's almost total lack of tax payments to the federal government was yet another piece of evidence about the tax system being rigged for the big corporations.
"SpaceX has secured billions in government contracts over the years," they wrote. "In return, it has likely paid... $0 in federal income taxes—and may never have to. Just in case you needed a pre-weekend reminder of how unfair our tax code is!"
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'We Have Been Working Against That': Trump and Johnson Dump Cold Water on Millionaire Tax Hike
"We fully expect Republicans to once again sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy benefactors at the expense of working people," said one progressive campaigner.
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump indicated in an interview published Friday that he's unlikely to push congressional Republicans to include a tax hike on millionaires in their sprawling reconciliation bill, saying he doesn't "want it to be used against me politically."
Trump's comments to TIME magazine came a day after he told reporters in the Oval Office that raising the statutory income tax rate on people who earn more than $1 million a year would be "very disruptive, because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country." (The notion of millionaire tax flight, often cited by Republicans as a reason not to raise taxes on the rich, has been repeatedly debunked.)
In recent weeks, pro-Trump figures such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and a small number of Republicans in Congress have floated the idea of slightly raising income taxes for millionaires, suggesting the move would help counter progressive attacks on Trump and his billionaire-stocked Cabinet as a manifestation of the United States' descent into oligarchy.
"This guts the AOC-Bernie 'oligarchy tour,'" Bannon told The Washington Post earlier this week. "Politically, it's game, set, match—it's a no-brainer. This would destroy the Democrats."
But Trump told TIME that he's concerned about political backlash stemming from any tax increase on millionaires, even as he acknowledged it "doesn't make that much of a difference" to the rich.
"I would be honored to pay more," said Trump, whose organization was convicted in 2022 of a long-running tax fraud scheme. "But I don't want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News earlier this week that he "would not expect" a millionaire tax hike to wind up in the GOP reconciliation package, which is expected to extend the 2017 Trump-GOP tax breaks and enact an additional $1.5 trillion in tax cuts—paid for in part by slashing Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other programs.
"We have been working against that idea," Johnson added. "I'm not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally."
"The real thing that's going on here is that Republicans are feeling the pressure of our messaging. They're cutting basic service programs like Medicaid and SNAP to give tax cuts to billionaires."
Proposals floated by Republican lawmakers and discussed in Trump's inner circle in recent days include allowing the top marginal tax rate to revert to 39.6%—the level prior to enactment of the 2017 tax cuts—next year and establishing a new top marginal rate of 40%, which would do nothing to tax mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, whose wealth is mostly stock that's only taxed when sold.
The millionaire tax hike proposals have drawn vocal opposition from big business, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the nation's largest corporate lobbying group—joining a recent letter rejecting any proposed tax increase on millionaires.
David Kass, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told Common Dreams in an interview Friday that "even if they did put something like this in" the final reconciliation package, "it's really important to remember that the bill would still be overwhelmingly skewed to the rich."
"The real thing that's going on here is that Republicans are feeling the pressure of our messaging," said Kass. "They're cutting basic service programs like Medicaid and SNAP to give tax cuts to billionaires."
Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, told Common Dreams in an emailed statement that "while we are supportive of efforts to raise the income tax rate on millionaires, if past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, we'll believe Republicans are serious about protecting working people from an unfair tax burden when we see it."
"As they prepare their bill for an early summer passage," said Pearl, "we fully expect Republicans to once again sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy benefactors at the expense of working people."
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