We Need to Wealth-Tax Billionaires ASAP

It's the obvious solution and yet everyone hates it

Sep 20, 2022

Purposefully creating inflation instead of taxing the rich is how you reset a society to serfdom.

When corporate-controlled governments print trillions of dollars out of thin air, corporations then raise their prices to soak up all that extra cash. Inflating prices is the literal definition of inflation.

While savers and pensioners and the poor will realistically watch their purchasing power get robbed by another 20% in the year ahead, the richest corporations on the planet (anti-human entities like the $20+ trillion Blackrock and Vanguard) stand to gain immense amounts of wealth and power. At the same time, tens of millions of real people — even full-time two-income working families — will suffer needless hardship, poverty, and destitution.

But taxing the rich and their corporations fixes this.

If you print trillions into the economy, you eventually need to tax it back.

But you can’t tax the poor and the working class, because they didn’t benefit from inflation at all.

Old white right-wingers will scream “communism!”, but the hard fact of reality is that humans need to tax those who benefit most from civilization.

It’s time for an aggressive global wealth tax on billionaires.

But “freedom!”

Hardcore libertarians, Bitboys, and other right-extremists (like many Democrats) have a seriously hard time with wealth taxes.

They subconsciously live under the delusion that they, too, will be billionaires someday, so heaven forbid we meaningfully tax those who’ve taken the most from society. So they try to convince themselves that taxing the rich is wrong because billionaires supposedly “create jobs,” when they actually do the exact opposite.

They wrongly assume we live in a dog-eat-dog-survival-of-the-fittest-winner-take-all world, when in reality, it was human cooperation that made us Earth’s apex species.

Their worry is that when they somehow buck the reins of mathematical reality and magically become a billionaire, society will take away was they’ve rightfully “earned.”

This is an insanely selfish, anti-commons, sociopathic way of thinking about our global family. Frankly, hyper-individualism is a form of mental illness.

And they’re failing to see the real benefits of what would happen if we meaningfully taxed billionaire wealth.

As we’ll see today, we’ll all become a whole lot richer when we start doing the right thing together.

First off: Billionaires will still be stupidly rich

At the time of writing this, Elon Musk’s wealth horde totals $255 billion.

Using this handy reverse interest calculator, we learn that if humanity had even a 20% annual global wealth tax, in twenty years Elon Musk would still have more than $6.6 billion, not including ANY additional income or growth in the next two decades. (The reality is that he would probably still have several hundred billion, because it’s not like he’s going to stop creating meme stock companies.)

Let’s do another one!

The anti-democracy Jeff Bezos is currently sitting on a Smaug-like pile worth $157 billion. If we implemented a measly 10% annual global wealth tax, Jeff Bezos would still be a billionaire in 2072, half a century from now. And let’s face it: A billion dollars is really way more than anyone ever truly needs.

Wealth taxing billionaires will cool the stock market

I hear you, libertarians. You’re howling “but it’s just stock, it’s not cash!”

And you’re absolutely right.

A global wealth tax would democratize the stock market, because it would force billionaires to liquidate some of their holdings to pay their annual tax.

This would mean more wealth equality across the board, allowing the masses to affordably own pieces of the companies they created.

It would also mean — and this is a hugely overlooked benefit of wealth taxes — that the stock market would suddenly become a meaningful metric again.

A stock’s price is supposed to be a signal of real value, but the price-value connection has been shattered by billionaire wealth-hoarding. With an annual global wealth tax, shares would flood the market, dropping stock prices back to reality.

Wealth-taxing billionaires will generate trillions to save the planet

There are currently an appalling 2,755 billionaires on the planet.

They currently control $13+ trillion.

If we implemented a 15% annual global wealth tax, that would generate nearly $2 trillion per year in revenue for the commons — money we could use to rapidly transition to renewables and avoid the climate catastrophe without causing a penny of inflation.

Wealth-taxing billionaires will protect our economic freedom

Not only do billionaires currently control more than $13 trillion, but their wealth is rising so exponentially quickly that they’re on track to own the entire world within our lifetime.

This is already having disastrous consequences for our economic freedom — our ability to fight for fair wages, our ability to create companies that can compete with monopolies, and our ability to purchase goods and services at legitimately competitive prices.

At present, billionaires have set humanity on the great reset to feudalism, using an insidious economic model called Subscription Serfdom. If we don’t wealth-tax billionaires, you will genuinely own nothing by 2050.

Democracy will have fewer enemies

Billionaires like Jeff Bezos hate democracy and actively oppose it.

Predator corporations like Airbnb hate democracy and actively oppose it.

If we want human people to have any sort of real voice, power, and freedom in the societies they built, then wealth-taxing billionaires and their corporations makes perfect sense — by spreading out wealth and power, no individual will be strong enough to play the tyrannical Caesar.

Wealth-taxing billionaires will cool inflation

Remember what causes inflation: Corporate-controlled governments print trillions of dollars out of thin air, and then corporations raise their prices to soak up all that extra cash.

If you want to deflate prices, you need to tax all those printed billions back.

Take, for instance, the money that was printed during the pandemic. $6 or so trillion was printed, and billionaire wealth grew by $5.5 trillion.

If we wealth-taxed billionaires —essentially the sole beneficiaries of inflation — we’d finally enjoy stable money that actually retains its purchasing power instead of being a secret 20% tax on the working class and the poor.

Wealth-taxing billionaires will make houses more affordable

Cheaper houses is another often-overlooked benefit of wealth-taxing billionaires.

If inflation is falling and the stock market is cooling to sanity, this has the knock-on effect of resetting house prices toward reality as well.

It also means billionaires and their corporations will have less money to outbid 25,000 families per month, paying cash and rent-trapping them forever.

Billionaires will stop evading taxes

If we had a global wealth tax, billionaires wouldn’t have any incentive to move to the Cayman Islands or Switzerland.

With a global wealth tax, there is nowhere left for billionaires to hide their money, and the tax evasion industry (looking at you, accounting firms) will simply collapse.

Wealth-taxing billionaires sends a moral message

At the end of the day, how a nation taxes its citizens says a lot about how a nation sees itself.

If a nation like America lets its billionaires evade more than half of all taxation like it currently does, it says that America is actually a failed state.

A global wealth tax on billionaires sends a message to all of humanity that we don’t believe in infinite wealth accumulation while other members of our global family suffer and die.

A global wealth tax on billionaires sends a message to all of humanity that the planet matters, that sustainability matters, that freedom matters, that democracy matters.

A global wealth tax on billionaires sends a message to all of humanity that widest-spread human wellbeing is far more important than corporate profits.

Which is exactly why nearly everyone resists the idea of a wealth tax.

🛡 Surviving Tomorrow