Jeff Bezos says raising his taxes is pointless.

He’s partly right. Bezos has gotten away with paying no income tax in some years, so technically doubling that wouldn’t help. 

That’s why we need a wealth tax that even the slipperiest of billionaires can’t wriggle their way out of.

That’s what my colleague, economist Gabriel Zucman, is proposing. 

He’s one of the top experts on wealth inequality and billionaire tax avoidance — two of the greatest threats to American freedom and democracy. Listen to this.

Forget the top 1 percent for a moment. Let’s talk about the richest ZERO POINT ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE PERCENT of Americans, which now includes 19 households. The oligarchs. 

Together they hold the equivalent of 14 percent of U.S. GDP in wealth: roughly $4 trillion. 

It means that if these 19 families spent their wealth, they could buy 14% of everything that’s produced in a given year in the US.

At the peak of the first Gilded Age at the beginning of the 20th century, that same group of the population owned just 4 percent of GDP in wealth. 

This is dangerous. 

There’s a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and democracy. That’s because extreme wealth is extreme power — the power to stifle competition, shape laws, buy elections, and stall social progress. 

In 2000, billionaires accounted for 1 percent of total campaign spending. In 2024 they accounted for 19 percent. 

Everything downstream of the political system is affected by the surge of billionaire influence: the courts, regulatory power, economic policy, and media independence. That’s how the super-rich have been able to rig the tax code to live nearly tax-free. 

Letting so much of America’s wealth go untaxed also starves the nation of resources. It prevents the US from making the necessary investments in higher education, in health care, in public infrastructure that are vital to future growth and prosperity.

So what can we do?

I’ve been studying inequality for years. One of the lessons of the first Gilded Age is that we instituted new taxes on the super rich to curb their power and build a fairer society. 

We need to do that again — but by taxing wealth, not just income. 

Taxing income alone isn’t sufficient, because the super-rich find ways to report little to no income. There was even one year when Jeff Bezos pretended he was so poor that he claimed and received the child tax credit.

Instead, we must tax wealth. In my book, We Need To Tax Billionaires, I’m proposing a minimum tax equal to 2 percent of wealth for people with net worth above $100 million dollars.

Someone already paying the equivalent of 2 percent or more of their wealth in taxes today would have nothing more to pay. 

It’s just those among the ultrarich who fail to pay their fair share who would owe anything. 

Despite this fair and logical proposal, Billionaire-owned media outlets fearmonger about taxing the rich, but don’t be fooled.

First, this wealth tax wouldn’t raise taxes on you or anyone you know. 

This wouldn’t raise taxes on millionaires or even most multi-millionaires. Only ultra-high-net-worth individuals with particularly low tax payments would be affected. It is the fairest tax you can imagine. 

Second, Billionaires wouldn’t be able to dodge this tax. 

Wealth is harder to manipulate and conceal than income. About half of billionaire wealth is in publicly-traded stock, which is straightforward to value. 

The value of private business assets, trusts, real estate, and even works of art can also be calculated. 

Billionaires regularly borrow against their assets because lenders and everyone else knows this is real wealth.

In 2023, when Mark Zuckerberg bought a half-billion-dollar mega yacht and a luxury compound in Hawaii, he didn’t have to sell off stock. 

He took a loan that year against $3 billion dollars of his Meta stock. 

Third, this wouldn’t result in tax flight: Billionaires cannot avoid this tax by moving assets or physically moving abroad. They would still have to pay this tax as a US citizen no matter where they live. 

Fourth, you may have heard that wealth taxes used to exist in Europe, but they didn’t work. 

But past wealth taxes in Europe largely exempted the super-rich because they did not tax large shareholding, or taxed them for only a fraction of their true value.

My proposal takes the opposite approach. It focuses squarely on the ultra-wealthy, with no exemptions.

The bottom line is taxing the rich is not only good for the economy, it’s a matter of basic equality under the law. 

Billionaires get away with paying a lower tax rate than middle-class workers when you factor in all taxes paid. A 2 percent minimum wealth tax on the richest of the rich would put an end to this absurdity. 

Fundamentally, it creates a new principle: that extreme wealth has to come with unavoidable duties toward society. 

This is not radical. 

What is truly radical is the current situation, where billionaires are allowed to live nearly tax free, using their fortunes to play by a different set of rules while they amass even more wealth and power — and effectively create their own Gilded society.