I dream of seeing the title of this post on bumper stickers, billboards, and personal tattoos. The slogan “Tax the rich and save the world” comes from a message from the Patriotic Millionaires—a group of more than 200 high-net-worth Americans, from investors and executives to filmmakers and heirs, who are actively lobbying Congress to raise their own taxes.

Millionaires are watching billionaires pull further ahead financially, and watching their coastal properties sink closer to the waterline as unchecked carbon emissions push sea levels higher. As ecological economist James K. Boyce explains, the concentration of wealth that drives carbon-intensive consumption is the same force blocking the public investment needed to address it: The ultra-wealthy have the resources to protect themselves from environmental degradation, as well as the political power to resist dealing with it. Taxing the rich could help keep the planet livable for the rest of us.

The growing visibility of wealth concentration is rousing a coalition of economists, lawmakers, labor unions, and the worried rich who are pushing back against four decades of trickle-down orthodoxy. Their message is gaining traction: the ultra-wealthy are not paying their fair share, and working-class voters are getting shafted.

A useful place to start is with a number you've probably heard: According to the Wall Street Journal, the top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all tax revenue. Jeff Bezos recently reiterated this scandalously misleading claim. The figure applies only to federal income taxes, ignoring both Social Security taxes and state and local taxes. The Congressional Research Service estimates that about 63% of US tax filers pay more in payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare—than they do in federal income taxes. In addition, state sales taxes and local property taxes eat up a larger percentage of the income of low and middle-income families than those at the top.

When the full tax picture is considered, the wealthy's "fair share" argument really falls apart. Paul Krugman dissects Bezos's claims in detail, and John Miller examines the Wall Street Journal's panicky response to Republican Mitt Romney's proposed tax reforms. The structural roots of the problem are powerfully explained by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in The Triumph of Injustice, which documents how the US tax system systematically privileges income from capital over income from labor. The most striking and consequential strategy rests on wealth accumulation: the very rich let their assets grow, untouched and tax free (capital gains aren’t taxed unless and until assets are sold for a profit). When the very rich need cash, they borrow against those assets at interest rates far below the income tax rate on wages—allowing wealth to compound while generating no taxable income at all. Capitalists have good reason to love capital.

California in the Headlines

In a Left Hook post last October, I described some important steps toward "taxing the top." Now California has captured national attention with a ballot initiative that could make history. This coming November, voters in the state will decide on the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act—a one-time levy of 5% on billionaire wealth, spread over five years. If passed, it would be the first tax anywhere in the world explicitly targeted at the combined personal and business wealth of billionaires. The initiative was drafted with input from Saez and Zucman and last week submitted enough certified signatures, more than 875,000, to qualify for the ballot.

The case is straightforward. California's roughly 250 billionaire households—0.001% of the state's families—now hold wealth equal to more than half of California's entire annual economic output. Yet from 2019 to 2025, while their wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. The four wealthiest Californians—Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg—paid an effective tax rate of just 0.07% of their wealth. Because they didn't sell their stock, its rising value was simply never taxed.

The proposed tax would raise approximately $100 billion—enough to offset the federal health care and social program funding that the Trump administration has stripped from the state. Critics warn that billionaires will flee to Nevada or Florida, but Saez and Zucman have done the math: even if every single California billionaire departed, it would take 25 years for the resulting loss in tax revenue to exceed the one-time haul from the wealth tax. Washington state has already passed a millionaires' tax, and New York City's mayor is proposing a 2% levy on........

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