Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

The Billionaire Problem Has Only One Solution: A Wealth Tax

“It is beyond grotesque that a group of men who could fit in a golf buggy own more than the poorest half of humanity”

Billionaires—triumphant with the return of Donald Trump—act like they own the world these days, which they pretty much do. So, it’s worth remembering that, about 150 years ago, in a period known as the “Gilded Age” in the United States, the ultrawealthy were similarly ascendant and seemingly untouchable, and yet that changed dramatically in the course of just a few years.

In the early 1900s, leading nations abruptly adopted progressive taxation, forcing the ultrawealthy to pay taxes, essentially for the first time. This greatly diminished their dominance while adding huge revenues to government coffers, enabling the rise of the social welfare state and creating what had never really existed before: the middle class.

The sudden emergence of progressive taxation and the accompanying rise of the middle class were pivotal developments in humanity’s long, precarious march toward greater equality—and clearly sources of inspiration for more than 200 economists, legal experts, and policy makers who came from around the world in April 2025 to a conference at the Paris School of Economics called “Taxing Billionaires.”

The goal of this committed group was clear: to keep the momentum going toward the development and implementation of a wealth tax aimed at the super-rich, even in the face of the second inauguration of Trump months earlier. Undoubtedly, if a wealth tax does find its way onto the world agenda, it will be because of a decade of hard slogging by the team gathered in Paris, led by the brilliant French economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. They had managed, in 2024, to get their wealth tax proposal onto the agenda of the G20, where it was actively promoted by Brazil, which held the G20 presidency that year. Signalling support for the concept, the G20 finance ministers took the unusual step of committing to “engage cooperatively to ensure ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.”

The push for a new wealth tax is really the brainchild of Piketty, whose 2014 publication, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, opened up a long-dormant debate about extreme inequality and kick-started the move to seriously tax the staggering concentrations of wealth accumulating at the very top. Following the path-breaking work of Piketty, the torch was picked up by his former student Gabriel Zucman, who had gone on to teach economics at both the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley. Along with another Berkeley economist, Emmanuel Saez, Zucman brought the focus of the battle to the US, where progressive taxation had once been a guiding principle.

In their book, The Triumph of Injustice, Saez and Zucman lay out the powerful story, largely ignored today, of how the US raised itself out of the devastating depression of the 1930s not by relying on the marketplace and the barons of industry but by greatly extending the role of government, creating massive public works and strong programs that lifted millions out of poverty.

To pay for all this government activism, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt put in place an astonishingly progressive tax system and rigorously clamped down on any tax avoidance schemes the rich concocted. “The United States was a beacon of tax justice. It was the democracy with the most steeply progressive system of taxation on the planet,” write Saez and Zucman. “In the 1930s, U.S. policymakers invented—and then for almost half a century applied—top marginal income tax rates of 90 percent on the highest earners. Corporate profits were taxed at 50 percent; large estates at close to 80 percent. With the revenue generated, the United States built the........

© The Walrus