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The World's First Trillionaire Is a Flashing Red Light for Democracy
Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare; it’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected.
Jun 28, 2026
The red emergency light is flashing on America’s democracy dashboard, like a damaged aircraft teetering toward a mountain. Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should make us tremble for the future of self-governing republics. It’s as if we’re bringing back modern pharaohs to dominate our societies.
Musk’s SpaceX company recently went public with a (probably inflated) market capitalization of $2 trillion. SpaceX’s IPO increased Musk’s net worth by an estimated $188 billion, and the stock’s first-day surge subsequently pushed his fortune to roughly $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.
The concern here isn’t with wealth per se. It’s the tremendous power of concentrated wealth to distort markets, politics, and society. When you have Musk’s level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet (of which he already has several). You’re buying a media outlet, a senator, and maybe, in the case of Musk, elevating a president.
Musk has no inhibitions about deploying the power of his considerable wealth. He bought Twitter, one of the public squares of our time, and transformed it into X, a partisan and disinformation platform rife with hate speech and extremism.
We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.
In the 2024 election cycle, he donated $291 million to President Donald Trump and Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Mother Jones, “Musk expended 0.1% of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.” Mechanic notes “The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies.”
Musk was rewarded with a rogue government agency—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), named for a crypto meme coin Musk invested in—to advance a self-interested data grab and chainsawing away at government capacity. Public Citizen found that 70% of the agencies that were targeted by DOGE had conflicts of interest for Musk’s businesses. For example, Musk directed DOGE to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would have overseen X’s move to become a payment processor.
More dire still, DOGE cuts to USAID and other humanitarian aid programs have contributed to an estimated 750,000 lost lives. The projected deaths from these cuts run into the millions.
Musk was further rewarded with lucrative government contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other Musk-companies. In early 2025, The New York Times reported on a boost in multi-billion-dollar contracts for Musk’s companies as the Trump administration took power.
That was Musk as a “mere” centi-billionaire. What other power might Musk be able to wield as the world’s first trillionaire?
But it’s not just Musk. America’s 16 centi-billionaires (including Musk) have a combined wealth of $4 trillion. And the 977 billionaires on the Forbes US wealth list now own a combined $9.24 trillion, according to analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.
This isn’t a partisan concern. Whether it’s liberals like George Soros and Tom Steyer or right-wingers like Musk and Peter Thiel, this concentration of power and influence should trigger the flashing red light. It’s never a good thing for anyone to have the power of modern-day pharaohs. Musk was the top political donor in 2024, but five other billionaire households gave over $100 million to candidates.
Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare. It’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected. We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.
Oxfam observes Musk could give $100 to every person on Earth and remain one of the 10 richest people on the planet. A 10% wealth tax on Musk’s fortune alone, they estimate, could end global extreme poverty and lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line. Imagine the revenue and investment possibilities of a global wealth tax on all billionaires.
The planet’s first trillionaire is not a sign of economic health. It’s an indicator of extreme inequality and the dangers of concentrated power.
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'Thinking He Can Fool Everyone,' Newsom Backs One Billionaires Tax But Not Another
"The misdirect here is that Newsom is opposing a WEALTH tax on billionaires in his own state and insisting he supports a new national INCOME tax on billionaires. But billionaires make money off non-income sources."
Jun 26, 2026
Critics say that Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to trick voters with his new plan for a national billionaire income tax, while simultaneously opposing a tax on billionaire wealth in his own state.
Along with a coterie of wealthy donors, Newsom has long stressed that he is adamantly opposed to the statewide plan to institute a one-time 5% tax on the total wealth of those in the state with more than $1 billion to fund healthcare, education, and food assistance programs, which has been spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW).
But a day after the measure was certified to appear on voters' ballots, Newsom—who is expected to run for president in 2028 and face an electorate that is angrier than ever about the outsized wealth and power of the billionaire class—unveiled a new national proposal that, at least on the surface, seems to hit many of the same populist notes as the one in California.
It's time for a national billionaires tax and a new social contract.
10% of Americans own two-thirds of the wealth. Wages have stagnated. The cost of living has skyrocketed.
The system is fundamentally broken.
The federal tax code, a corporate code, and an inheritance code… pic.twitter.com/tLRbUId6yi
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 26, 2026
"Last night, it became certain that a wealth tax would be placed on the November ballot in California. I’m voting no," he explained in a Substack post, in which he rehashed many of his previous objections—including the factually dubious idea that a wealth tax would supposedly lead to mass capital flight from the state. He also said the plan to spend most of the revenue on healthcare neglects other needs like housing, childcare, and public safety.
As an alternative, he proposed what he referred to as "a national billionaires’ tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires and those with a net worth of over $100 million."
When counting unrealized wealth gains as income, America’s richest billionaires actually pay lower effective tax rates than the average American. A 2025 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) estimated that the richest 400 Americans paid about 24% of total income in taxes from 2018-20, compared with 30% for the public as a whole.
"That system is the result of decades of loopholes written by lobbyists and upheld by politicians who knew exactly who they worked for," Newsom said. "The wealthy have their own private tax code full of loopholes and exemptions that most people have never heard of, and they’re counting on politicians in Washington to maintain it and keep quiet."
Referencing an idea from the Obama era, Newsom described his plan as "a modern Buffett Rule—that ensures the people at the very top pay at least the tax rate their own workers pay."
While he did not elaborate on what rate he'd plan to charge the wealthiest Americans, the original 2012 Buffett Rule would have required that millionaires pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30% of their adjusted gross income (AGI), which includes things like capital gains and other sources of income that are normally taxed at lower rates.
One might assume that such immense wealth translates into equally enormous tax payments.
It doesn't.
According to a study we have just completed, California's billionaires pay only 0.07% of their wealth each year in California income tax—representing barely 0.2% of the state's… pic.twitter.com/87W7y67sXh
— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) June 26, 2026
While Newsom had borrowed the "billionaire tax" branding of California's popular proposal, critics pointed out that he was proposing something vastly weaker.
"Read his Substack post carefully," implored Lever editor-in-chief David Sirota in a social media post. "He’s talking about income taxes and closing a few loopholes, but not a national version of the WEALTH tax on the ballot in California."
"The misdirect here is that Newsom is opposing a WEALTH tax on billionaires in his own state and insisting he supports a new national INCOME tax on billionaires," Sirota said. "But billionaires make money off non-income sources."
Gabriel Zucman, a French economist who has championed the wealth tax measure in California, has said this critical distinction between wealth and income is the reason why a wealth tax in California is needed to begin with.
"California's billionaires now hold $2.3 trillion in wealth—equivalent to roughly half of California's [gross domestic product] and about 10% of US GDP," he said. "One might assume that such immense wealth translates into equally enormous tax payments. It doesn't."
Citing a NBER working paper from last month, Zucman pointed out that "California's [top four] billionaires pay only 0.07% of their wealth each year in California income tax" while billionaires as a whole represent "barely 0.2% of the state's total tax revenue," meaning that they "contribute a negligible amount to the state that made them rich."
He noted that Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—who have publicly opposed the billionaire's tax and, in Brin's case, spent tens of millions of dollars trying to stop it—reported no taxable income in 2019, 2020, and 2023 because all of their wealth was held in company stock. Since they didn't sell any stock during those years, they had no capital gains and therefore owed no income tax.
In the meantime, Zucman noted, "their fortunes have increased by more than $400 billion" since 2019.
🚨NEW: @RoKhanna suggests @GavinNewsom is trying to block a billionaire tax in order to protect big donors.
"Why would you want to side with 250 billionaires over the working class? The only reason...is because you care about 250 people's contributions." pic.twitter.com/mg9kHPGSa2
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2026
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—another potential 2028 presidential candidate who introduced his own federal billionaire wealth tax legislation in March with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—has vocally questioned Newsom's opposition to the ballot measure in California.
"Why would you want to side with 250 billionaires over the working class in California?" he asked earlier this week on a podcast hosted by Sirota. "The only reason, in my view, to not be taxing them is because you care about these 250 people's contributions to the political system."
Sirota speculated that Newsom's motivation behind co-opting and watering down the "billionaire tax" concept was much the same.
He said, "This is Newsom thinking he can fool everyone and going to bat for billionaire donors who could fund his presidential campaign."
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Elon Musk Is the World's First Trillionaire—Let's Make Sure He's the Last
Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.
Jun 13, 2026
Elon Musk was set to become the world’s first trillionaire Friday after the public debut of his rocket and AI company, SpaceX.
Sit with that number for a moment. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you 2,700 years to spend down a trillion. It is more than the entire GDP of Argentina or Nigeria. It is a figure so large that our brains are not really equipped to process it as a real thing.
According to Oxfam, 60% of billionaire wealth globally is not “earned” in any sense of the word that you or I would recognize, but derived from inheritance, monopoly power, or crony connections.
By UBS’s own count, the great wealth transfer is accelerating, with a record $297.8 billion passing to just 91 heirs in 2025. Musk’s own wealth did not surge through some new invention, but through a private-market revaluation of SpaceX and his AI company xAI, a paper merger that pushed his net worth from $500 billion to $800 billion in just four months.
The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.
Tesla, the engine of much of his wealth, runs on public subsidy, tax incentives, and regulatory frameworks his own companies have spent years bending into shape. Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.
Earlier this year—while his companies held billions in government contracts—Musk played a role inside the US government running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE fired the regulators, hollowed out the agencies, and dismantled the oversight structures that might otherwise have asked awkward questions of his own companies.
A Yale model estimated Musk’s political activities cost Tesla between one million and 1.26 million US vehicle sales as furious Americans boycotted the electric car manufacturer. He took that hit and kept going, which tells you what the access was worth to him. This is regulatory capture as a business model, dressed up as a public service.
But this is not about one man and his excessive wealth. It is systemic, and the same pattern recurs across every region.
In South Africa, the Gupta brothers spent years so deeply embedded in former President Jacob Zuma’s government that a judicial commission concluded the state itself had been captured, with cabinet appointments and contracts steered to serve private interests.
In India, Gautam Adani built one of the world’s great fortunes in lockstep with his proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, winning state contracts and infrastructure concessions as his net worth soared, while those who called it crony capitalism were brushed aside.
In Mexico, Carlos Slim became one of the richest men on Earth almost overnight when the Salinas government privatized the state telephone monopoly and sold it to him, handing a public asset to a private fortune that has dominated the country’s telecoms ever since.
Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and where they do not hold office outright, they buy the people who do. When wealth concentrates at this velocity, democracy is revealed as a sham.
Meanwhile, the world that produced this wealth continues as it is. The World Inequality Report, drawing on the work of 200 researchers, found that the poorest half of humanity holds barely 2% of global wealth while fewer than 60,000 people at the very top control three times as much as that entire bottom half combined.
This context cannot be separated from the Musk wealth story. The systems that funnel money upward at unbelievable speed are the same systems that underfund public health, load poor countries with debt they cannot escape, and leave communities without the basics that governments once treated as obligations.
You will be told, as you always are, that taxing extreme wealth is complicated, that capital flees, that redistribution is a blunt and dangerous tool. These arguments are made by people who would be taxed more.
A wealth tax sufficient to fund universal healthcare and education across the Global South has been modeled, costed, and proposed repeatedly. The obstacle has never been the arithmetic. It has always been the politics, and the politics is owned by the people the tax would affect.
But here is what the first trillionaire does not want you to notice. Across the same world that produced Musk’s fortune, the 99% are organizing. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded more than 110 major anti-government protests across 70 countries in the last year. Most of them were powered by the same anger at the same rigged system.
Young people forced a tax climbdown in Kenya, brought down governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and took to the streets from Morocco to Indonesia demanding the rules be rewritten. They did it without trillion-dollar war chests. They did it themselves, alongside people like you and me, in solidarity, with an insistence that wealth concentration is not inevitable.
That movement is the counterweight to everything this moment represents. Billionaires are feeling the pressure. In May, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to insist the tax system is crony capitalism, defend his peers against "vilification," and deny that the ultra rich avoid tax at all, the sound of a class that suddenly feels the need to argue its case in public.
Every wealth tax now argued seriously in a parliament, every billionaire levy being debated at the United Nations, every debt cancellation demand making it onto a government agenda arrived there because people organized and refused to accept the terms being set for them from above. The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.
The 12 of June, 2026 may be the day the first trillionaire was officially minted, but it can also be the moment millions more people decide they have had enough.
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To Crush Global Inequality and Secure Livable Future, Scholars Call for 90% Tax on Mega-Rich
"The current international order is plutocratic," said French economist Thomas Piketty. "It is essential to move away from this plutocratic system to a new democratic order."
Jun 04, 2026
A sprawling report released Thursday argues that averting the "bleak techno-authoritarian futures now being sold to us" and laying the groundwork for a just, livable future requires restructuring the world's economic order to widely redistribute wealth that has been hoarded at the very top for decades.
The report, compiled by hundreds of researchers from around the world and published by the World Inequality Lab (WIL), is billed as the first comprehensive attempt to lay out a plan to "reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all." Achieving that aim will be impossible, the authors argue, "without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth, and power."
"The current international order is plutocratic," said French economist Thomas Piketty, a renowned expert on inequality and co-director of WIL. "It is essential to move away from this plutocratic system to a new democratic order."
The report outlines a number of proposals that would redress staggering levels of wealth and income inequality. Currently, the top 10% of the global population brings in more income than the remaining 90% combined. Wealth inequality is even more extreme, with the top 10% controlling 75% of global wealth, compared to 2% controlled by the poorest half of humanity.
Specifically, the authors call for a new, progressive global income tax that would peak at 90% for those who earn 5,000 times the average adult disposable income. They also propose taxing the wealth of millionaires and billionaires at a rate up to 20%.
Revenue from the new taxes would flow into a Global Justice Fund, which would distribute dividends to countries to help boost spending on climate, education, and healthcare. The fund would also invest in a World Sovereign Fund, whose returns on "sustainable assets" would be used to finance country dividends.
"The result is not a transfer from many to few but a gain for almost everyone," Piketty and other report contributors wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian. "Close to 90% of the world’s population would double their income between 2026 and 2100, and once leisure and a habitable planet are counted, more than 99% come out ahead."
"Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical."
Redressing inequality would not be sufficient to secure a livable future, the report authors emphasize, given that continued fossil fuel use and expansion are pushing the world in the direction of climate catastrophe. What's required to prevent planetary disaster is a "fundamental transformation of energy systems," the report argues.
"This means electrifying energy demand wherever feasible (such as transitioning vehicle fleets) and switching to low-carbon fuels (for example, in steel and cement production)," the report states. "Crucially, electricity generation itself must be decarbonized, moving away from fossil fuels toward renewables like hydropower, solar, and wind."
The report also envisions a move away from overconsumption toward what the authors call a future of "sufficiency," which would entail shorter work hours for the global labor force, changes to land use, and other reforms.
Such ambitious goals will not become reality, the report stresses, without "a powerful citizen movement and a dense network of broad-based organizations (including labor unions, political parties, civic platforms, and other collective initiatives) which are sufficiently well-organized and effective at promoting broad institutional and policy change."
"A habitable, equal, and prosperous 21st Century is materially possible," the authors declare. "Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical. What it will take instead is political choice, and the hard work of coalition-building behind it."
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'Are Readers Meant to Take This Seriously?': Economist Refutes Latest Attack on Wealth Tax by Bezos' Washington Post
"Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us," said Emmanuel Saez, the French economist who designed California's wealth tax proposal.
May 07, 2026
The architect of California's wealth tax proposal called out The Washington Post and its multibillionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Thursday for peddling what he said is "misinformation" to readers.
Emmanuel Saez, a French economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was tapped by California's largest union to design the tax proposal, singled out an opinion piece by the Washington Post editorial board from earlier this week that argues the proposal would backfire and cost California billions of dollars in tax revenue each year.
Saez said the article contains glaring falsehoods and omits key information about the proposal, which aims to create a one-time tax of 5% on the total assets of California's roughly 200 billionaire residents in order to recoup about $100 billion in revenue for healthcare, food assistance, and education stripped from the state by last year's Republican federal budget legislation, which will hand $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the next 10 years.
The piece, published on Monday with the headline "California already losing with billionaire tax referendum," argues that even if California voters don't ultimately approve the measure, "the specter of such a wealth tax has already cost the state more in lost future revenue from income taxes than it would raise" due to an exodus of wealthy people from the state—an oft-used but weakly substantiated talking point by opponents of the measure.
The Post cited a paper by Jared Walczak, a visiting fellow at the California Tax Foundation, which it said demonstrates that billionaire flight "will cost California’s state government somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion every year in other tax collections, and up to $19 billion in lost [gross domestic product]."
But Saez argued that his study makes a "basic mistake" by "modeling a mobility response of billionaires to a permanent annual and recurrent 5% wealth tax." In reality, though, the tax would be imposed only once and would apply to any billionaires who resided in the state after January 1, 2026, which has already passed, so it no longer creates an incentive to move.
Saez argued that in any case, "Walczak’s estimation of the California income tax paid by billionaires who have threatened to leave is also wildly exaggerated."
Walczak's figure for lost tax revenue, he said, hinges on the idea that the three richest men who've threatened to leave the state, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pay $1.7 billion in California income taxes each year.
"If only they paid so much!" Saez quipped.
"In reality, using Securities and Exchange Commission data on stock sales, stock donations, dividends, and executive compensation, we can directly estimate that they paid only [$269 million] in California income tax in 2025, 6.3 times less than Walczak’s assumption," he said, citing a paper he co-wrote in March responding to a similar argument by a conservative think tank.
He cited tax data showing that the tech tycoons—who own a combined $810 billion according to Forbes—only collectively paid about [$22 million] per year on average between 2019-25, with Brin and Page paying no taxes on their wealth from stock in Google's parent company Alphabet during three of those years because they didn't sell stock, get dividends, or receive executive compensation. This is despite 90% of their wealth coming from those holdings.
"The one-time wealth tax finally makes them contribute in proportion to their enormous wealth gains," Saez said.
The Post also claimed that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, the union leading the charge in support of the referendum, is "pretend[ing] that the tax is needed to save California’s health system from 'collapse'" and is instead dishonestly using that framing to covertly pursue the "redistribution of wealth."
But Saez said that the federal cuts of roughly $20 billion annually are already having devastating effects on Californians that could be alleviated with more tax revenue.
As a result of the cuts, "more than 400 California hospitals have already laid off more than 3,400 healthcare workers as of mid-March, with a second wave of layoffs expected as funding cuts tied to recent federal policy changes are phased in over the next several years," he said. "Statewide, projections show the cuts could result in the loss of up to 145,000 healthcare jobs, impacting hospitals, clinics, and home care providers alike."
Eighty-three more hospitals in California may be at risk of closing due to the federal funding cuts, according to a recent nationwide analysis by Public Citizen. But Saez said the billionaire's tax would go a long way toward closing the gap.
"Right now, California’s billionaires pay much lower tax rates than what working families pay out of every paycheck," Saez said.
Despite claims otherwise by the Post editorial board—which last month ran another piece arguing that due to progressive taxation, "the rich already pay more than their fair share"—according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, at all levels of government from 2018-20, billionaires paid just 24% of their total income in taxes, while the US-wide average was 30%. This disparity arises largely due to loopholes that allow the rich to avoid taxes on business and investment gains that are not sold.
"Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us," Saez said.
Debru Carthan, the executive vice president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, said it was not surprising that the Post "completely ignores that the billionaire tax would keep hospitals from closing and healthcare costs from skyrocketing for millions of Californians" because it is "a crisis that comes as a direct result of the tax breaks handed out to Jeff Bezos and his buddies."
Since the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, the Amazon founder has taken a much heavier hand over the content of his flagship paper, including its opinion section, which he last year mandated to exclusively publish pieces on economics that promote “personal liberties and free markets," leading to the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley.
But Saez marveled at how blatant Bezos' thumb on the scale has appeared in his paper's coverage of California's billionaire wealth tax and similar proposals, which it has denounced on several other occasions.
“Are readers meant to take this seriously?" Saez asked. "‘Board of billionaire-owned paper comes out against tax on billionaires’? Everyone knows this board makes political decisions at the behest of Jeff Bezos, but this one is the most transparent of them all."
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'Taxing Billionaires Is Not Radical': Mamdani Joins Top Economists to Denounce 'Rigged' US Tax System
While most Americans are paying more in taxes this year, the wealthiest 1% are saving an average of $9,000 thanks to Trump's tax legislation.
Apr 15, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using Tax Day to remind Americans that the nation's tax code is "rigged" to protect the superrich while making the case for a more equitable system.
In a Guardian op-ed co-written with Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz and Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, New York's democratic socialist mayor lamented that the world is living with greater wealth inequality than ever before, with just 0.0001% of the global population holding the equivalent of 16% of global wealth—more than the bottom half of humanity.
Mamdani and the economists attributed the global surge in inequality in large part to America's "regressive" tax system, which has grown dramatically more favorable to the wealthy over the past half-century.
As wealth concentrates, so does power — the power to influence elections, shape policy, tilt markets and define the terms of public debate.Taxing billionaires is not radical.What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship.
[image or embed]
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) April 15, 2026 at 11:05 AM
Compared to 1960, when the 400 richest Americans paid roughly half their incomes in taxes, they now pay about 24%—helped by a combination of lower marginal tax rates and loopholes that allow billionaires and corporations to shield their wealth and effectively pay a smaller share of their incomes than everyone else.
This inequality was further exacerbated by the massive GOP tax law signed by President Donald Trump last year, which a report by Americans for Tax Fairness found gave the wealthiest 1% of households an average tax break of $9,000.
While the Trump administration promised earlier this year that the average American family would receive a $1,000 tax refund from the legislation, Corey Husak, director of tax policy at the Center for American Progress, found that the average refund was just $346 higher than the previous year—and that even that figure was heavily inflated by the benefits accrued by the richest earners.
Meanwhile, those gains were more than wiped out by the added cost of Trump's tariffs and the dramatic cuts to the social safety net passed by Republicans, which have led to spiking health insurance costs and thrown millions off Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
"We can disagree about how progressive tax systems should be—the extent to which the rich should pay more tax, relative to their income, than the rest of us," Mamdani, Stiglitz, and Zucman wrote. "But there is no justification for a regressive system in which the superrich contribute less than the rest of us. This is how inequality is deepened and sustained."
The authors praised efforts in other countries to combat rising inequality. One initiative they highlighted was a 2% tax on the wealth of those with more than €100 million ($117 million), a proposal championed by Zucman. A version of the measure was passed last year by France's National Assembly but stalled in the Senate after being blocked by centrist and right-wing parties.
But the initiative still has momentum around the world. This weekend, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will meet with the leaders of several other nations, including Mexico, Colombia, and South Africa, to discuss adopting similar taxes.
Meanwhile, in the US, a proposed ballot initiative for a one-time 5% billionaire tax in California—aimed at recouping losses from Trump's Medicaid cuts—appears overwhelmingly popular, with around two-thirds support according to a poll last month, despite aggressive lobbying by billionaires to stop the measure.
Mamdani has pushed for a similar measure in New York City to help balance the city budget and fund universal childcare and affordable housing.
On Wednesday, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that she was backing a so-called "pied-à-terre tax," which applies a surcharge to anyone with a second home valued over $5 million in New York City. Mamdani's office has estimated that it will raise $500 million annually.
In early 2026, consumer prices and housing costs have soared far faster than wages can match. A January poll from KFF found that 82% of adults said their overall cost of living had increased over the past year, with around two-thirds saying they worried about affording healthcare for themselves and their families, and nearly a quarter saying they were worried about affording food and rent.
In response to this economic precarity, more than 62% of Americans said in a January YouGov survey that they felt billionaires are taxed too little, and more than half said that wealth inequality is a problem.
"The idea that billionaires should pay higher tax rates than working people is not radical," the authors of the Guardian op-ed said. "What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship—and where those billionaires can in effect opt out of contributing to the society that made their success possible."
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Avi Lewis Models How to Be a Climate Champion Despite Opposition
His forthright approach on a difficult issue is likely to appeal to voters.
Apr 01, 2026
Well, as honeymoons go, that was brief.
Avi Lewis may well have set a record for honeymoon brevity in Canadian politics. He wasn’t even done accepting the great prize of winning the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) last Sunday before two key figures in his own party denounced him over his resolve to move the country beyond fossil fuels.
Lewis may also have set something of a record for sheer cheerfulness in the face of such speedy backstabbing.
In response to Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi’s attack, Lewis didn’t miss a beat. Even as reporters pressed him for some hot words, Lewis remained buoyant and smiling as he insisted these disputes are necessary and inevitable. He even went on to voice strong support for Nenshi, maintaining that what really matters is Nenshi defeating Danielle Smith to become Alberta premier.
But while the issue is tough, the way forward is clear. Science doesn’t give us a lot of wiggle room; the clock is running out on the world’s remaining chances of preventing carbon emissions from reaching catastrophic levels.
Talk about turning the other cheek; that was a class act. It suggests that Lewis may have a shot at knitting the party together, despite this rather troubled start.
Of course, knitting the party together won’t be easy. There’s a serious divide in the NDP over whether fossil fuels should be kept in the ground, for the sake of saving the planet.
Let’s face it—this is a tricky issue for the NDP.
On one hand, climate action is a winning issue for the party; most progressive voters care about climate, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has opened up lots of territory on his left flank by abandoning any plausible claim to being a climate champion with his willingness to embrace Big Oil.
On the other hand, the fossil fuel industry is powerful and employs Canadians, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan—the two provinces where NDP leaders are hostile to Lewis.
But while the issue is tough, the way forward is clear. Science doesn’t give us a lot of wiggle room; the clock is running out on the world’s remaining chances of preventing carbon emissions from reaching catastrophic levels.
Furthermore, the world has already started transitioning to renewable energy. Not only are renewables increasingly affordable—battery costs have declined by 99% over the last three decades—but rebuilding our economy around them would be a huge job creator.
In fact, fossil fuel employment is on the decline, as the industry becomes less labor-intensive. Over the past decade, fossil fuel employment in Canada has already shrunk by 38,000 jobs, even as oil and gas production has risen significantly, notes economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work.
So Lewis is doing the right thing—not only in championing climate action, but in coming out and stating his position clearly, despite the political heat he’s taking for it inside his own party. This forthright approach on a difficult issue is likely to appeal to voters.
In addition to the knives wielded inside the party, Lewis can expect scorn from mainstream commentators, who tend to dismiss him as a left-wing extremist.
But are his positions too extreme for the electorate, or just too extreme for mainstream commentators?
Lewis advocates publicly-owned grocery stores and banks—ideas outside the political mainstream. But, given the way grocery and bank monopolies are squeezing customers these days, is it far-fetched to imagine voters might support public alternatives?
Interestingly, Toronto City Council voted last week to establish a pilot project for public grocery stores. And public banking through the post office, which existed in Canada for decades, could be a welcome alternative for low-income customers stung by payday loan operators, as well as for residents in rural areas, where banks are scarce.
Lewis also proposes a wealth tax on the very rich—again, an idea ridiculed by many mainstream commentators. But polls show it has wide popular support.
Perhaps these sorts of left-wing populist ideas have had trouble succeeding in Canadian politics because they’ve lacked a passionate and articulate advocate.
That may have just changed.
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'Let Me Clear Things Up': Bernie Sanders Explains Wealth Tax to Wall Street Overlord Jamie Dimon
“If my 5% wealth tax on billionaires was enacted, you’d owe $135 million more in taxes, and a family of four making $150,000 or less would receive a $12,000 payment. Oh, and you’d still be worth more than $2.5 billion."
Mar 31, 2026
As billionaires nationwide rally to stop tax increases on the wealthy, US Sen. Bernie Sanders stepped in to "clear things up" for one of Wall Street's top power brokers after he railed against the proposal.
Following in the footsteps of California, where a popular ballot initiative to impose a one-time 5% tax on the state's 200 billionaires has gained steam, Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced their own federal proposal earlier this month to tax those with net worths of more than $1 billion 5% of their annual household wealth.
The proposal is projected to raise $4.4 trillion over the next decade to provide direct payments to lower-income Americans, reverse Republicans' cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act spending, expand Medicare, and build millions of affordable housing units, among many other expenditures.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who is worth about $2.8 billion according to Forbes, appeared on Fox News on Tuesday and was asked by anchor Brian Kilmeade about Sanders' frequent accusations that billionaires "don't pay their fair share" in taxes.
"I don't know what he means by fair share," Dimon said. "I've listened to that my whole life, and I don't know what he means."
The two did not address the facts that may have led Sanders to draw such a conclusion. For instance, the senator often notes that fewer than 1,000 billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of the US, around 175 million people.
Those billionaires also manage to pay a lower effective tax rate than the average American by wielding loopholes that allow them to exempt large chunks of their fortunes.
Sanders took to social media to respond to Dimon's incredulity about his idea of "fairness."
"Ok, Jamie: Let me clear things up for you," the senator wrote. "If my 5% wealth tax on billionaires was enacted, you’d owe $135 million more in taxes, and a family of four making $150,000 or less would receive a $12,000 payment."
"Oh, and you’d still be worth more than $2.5 billion," Sanders added. "Seems pretty fair to me."
Dimon's remarks came as billionaires are in a full-blown panic over the proposal for a one-time 5% tax in California, which is projected to raise about $100 billion, mostly to cover the Medicaid funding shortfall caused by the massive cuts in last year's GOP budget law.
A poll earlier this month showed that the measure, which will be put to voters in November, has about 2-1 approval, despite a more than $80 million effort by the state's elite—most notably Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—to stop it in its tracks.
Dimon himself is not known to have contributed to the effort. But during his Tuesday appearance on Fox, he echoed one of the movement's oft-used talking points: that raising taxes on the rich leads to an "exodus" of wealth from financial hubs like New York and California.
As Forbes senior contributor Teresa Ghilarducci explained late last year, "Decades of economic research show that billionaire 'flight' is rare, exaggerated, and often confused with tax avoidance through accounting maneuvers rather than physical relocation."
Christopher Marquis and Nick Romeo similarly said last month in a piece for TIME that “despite multiple debunkings, the ‘millionaire exodus’ panic remains a popular narrative,” even though it is “frequently based on biased or sloppy arguments where anecdote replaces systematic evidence, correlation poses as causation, and every modest redistributive proposal is framed as an existential threat to prosperity.”
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Progressive Champion Avi Lewis Wins Leadership Race for Canada’s NDP, Vowing Left Party Will Come ‘Roaring Back’
"The NDP will start winning again because we will become that beacon to the 99%," Lewis said.
Mar 30, 2026
Progressive activist Avi Lewis is pledging to bring Canada's New Democratic Party "out of the wilderness" after being decisively elected as its new leader on Sunday on the back of an ambitious, affordability-focused agenda aimed at winning back working-class voters.
Lewis, the grandson of one of the NDP's cofounders, cruised to a resounding victory, earning 56% of the vote to take over leadership of the long-ailing left-wing party, which has bled members in recent years to both Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals and Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives.
He was introduced at Sunday's Winnipeg convention by his wife, the acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein, who said her husband's victory was an invitation for Canadians to “dream big once again" and renew the fight against corporate greed at a time when more than half of the population says they struggle to afford basic necessities.
Lewis has proposed a sweeping agenda of “public options” aimed at combating Canada’s affordability crisis, including publicly owned grocery stores and banks to compete with price-gouging corporate monopolies.
A scion of the party that helped to build Canada’s universal healthcare system—which covers hospital and physician care—he’s called for it to be expanded into a “head-to-toe” care system that guarantees dental, drugs, vision, hearing, and mental health services for all Canadians.
In order to pay for these programs and others—including public housing, green energy investment, and subsidized phone and internet plans—Lewis has campaigned to pass a wealth tax on the richest 1% of Canadians, who own nearly $1.25 trillion, almost as much as the bottom 80% of Canadians, according to a recent report by Oxfam Canada.
"This country is awash in wealth. We can have nice things," Lewis asserted to a raucous crowd during his acceptance speech. "Banks made $70 billion in profits last year alone. Oil companies are expecting a new windfall in the tens of billions. Grocery baron Galen Weston alone is worth $20 billion."
During his campaign, Lewis railed against tax cuts for wealthy Canadians passed by the Liberal government, which are projected to cost the government nearly $76 billion over five years and slash an estimated 57,000 public-sector jobs by 2028.
"It is time, far past time, to properly tax the billionaires and corporations that have been riding a tidal wave of profit," Lewis said.
While he acknowledged that Carney is still largely popular in Canada, in large part due to his fiery denunciations of US President Donald Trump's tariff war and threats to annex Canada, Lewis argued that the prime minister's revulsion toward Trumpism is only skin-deep.
"I think when you connect the dots, his moves do not add up to the vision that Canadians truly want and deserve in this perilous moment," he said. "Half a trillion dollars in a decade for weapons to make Canada a major arms exporter in a war-torn world. Slashing our cherished public services, sweeping aside indigenous rights... No regulations on AI and pipelines."
"In the last federal election, Canadians voted to say no to Trump and Trumpism," Lewis said. "What they're getting instead is our government following the US into a future of wars, fossil fuels, austerity, and job-killing generative AI."
Lewis will face a difficult task ahead in rebuilding the NDP from a disastrous loss of support under its previous leader, Jagmeet Singh, who stepped down from his post after the party suffered the worst defeat in its history during last April’s elections, dropping to just seven seats in Parliament—not even enough to be considered a “recognized” party.
The role of NDP leader is the highest office Lewis has held in his life, having run two failed campaigns for parliament in his native Vancouver in 2021 and 2025.
Though NDP currently sits at a distant third, with only about 7% support according to an Abacus poll from March, other polls show that their positions, including a wealth tax and expanding federal health coverage, are popular with the vast majority of voters across party lines.
Other polls show that Canadians, especially those with low incomes, increasingly view affordability and inequality as pressing issues, especially as Trump's war against Iran has caused global energy shortages and price hikes.
"The NDP is coming back because we know that a thriving world is possible, and we know who is standing in our way, and there are way more of us than there are of them," Lewis said. "The NDP will start winning again because we will become that beacon to the 99%."
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Billionaires Tax Supporters Up in California By Nearly 2-to-1, Poll Shows
"The American people are sick and tired of massive income and wealth inequality," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Billionaires need to start paying their fair share."
Mar 10, 2026
Voters in California are supporting a proposed wealth tax on billionaires in their state by a ratio of almost 2-to-1, according to a poll conducted by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.
Politico, which commissioned the poll from the center at the University of California, Berkeley, reported on Tuesday that support for the billionaire tax is currently at 50% of California voters, while just 28% registered opposition.
However, University of California Berkeley political scientist Jack Citrin told Politico that the measure's passage isn't yet a slam dunk because voters remain vulnerable to counterarguments against the plan, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaires' total wealth.
"The yes side has the current lead and you have some strong supporters, so that’s the good news," Citrin explained. "Most experts on the initiative process say that the yes side has an advantage to start with because no one’s been talking about it and it sounds like a good idea... but then once the campaign begins you whittle away at that."
Among other things, the poll found voters were concerned about whether the wealth tax would really be a one-time measure, whether it would push wealthy individuals out of the state, and whether the middle class would be forced to pay more in taxes to make up for the potentially departed billionaires.
Citrin told Politico that supporters of the wealth tax will have to convince voters that billionaires' threats to leave California if the measure passes are a bluff.
"If you’re the yes side you have to hammer away at: this isn’t true, they’re not going to leave, it’s just scare tactics," Citrin said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who along with other progressives has championed the wealth tax, hailed the UC Berkeley poll as a sign that the political tide is turning against US oligarchs.
"A new poll shows voters overwhelmingly support California’s proposal to tax billionaire wealth to fund healthcare—by nearly a 2-to-1 margin," Sanders wrote in a social media post. "The American people are sick and tired of massive income and wealth inequality. Billionaires need to start paying their fair share."
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, seen as a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, has gone on the record opposing the wealth tax and has said he will campaign for its defeat.
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