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HOW TO CREATE A NEW WORLD WITHOUT ELONS  
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Sam Pizzigati
February 19, 2025
Counterpunch
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_ The best way to counter our ongoing billionaire coup? We might want
to look east for a five-step set of initiatives designed to cut the
super rich down to democratic size. _

, Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

 

Americans these days don’t much like billionaires. Our ultra-rich,
Americans overwhelmingly believe, aren’t paying enough in taxes.
Polling earlier this month found
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nearly three-quarters of the nation’s likeliest voters — 74
percent — feel billionaires are paying “too little’ at tax time.

Just how concerned about billion-dollar fortunes have Americans
become? Nearly half of us overall, Harris polling found
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summer, would like to see a limit on “wealth accumulation.” Among
Gen Z’ers, that support for limits on billionaire fortunes runs
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the way up to 65 percent.

“Billionaires,” some 58 percent of Americans agreed in that same
Harris poll, “are becoming more like dictators.”

The share of Americans equating billionaires with dictators — given
Elon Musk’s current dominant role in the new Trump White House —
is most likely running even higher today.

The best way to counter our ongoing billionaire coup? We might want to
look east for some answers. In the run-up to Germany’s February 23
parliamentary elections, that nation’s Left Party, _Die Linke_, has
proposed a detailed five-step set of initiatives designed to cut the
super rich down to democratic size.

“We believe,” the _Die Linke_ co-chair Jan van Aken notes
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in his intro to his party’s new plan, “that there should not be
any billionaires.”

But van Aken and _Die Linke _understand quite well that no
government can suddenly snap its fingers and make billionaires
disappear. The party has instead melded ideas from all around the
world into a coherent and common-sense package.

The _Die Linke _plan’s step one: restoring a “wealth tax.”
Germany has been without one since the nation’s top court nixed the
wealth tax in effect back in 1995. The proposed new version would
revolve around an annual levy starting at 1 percent on wealth over 1
million euros — the equivalent of about $1.03 million — and rising
up to 12 percent on wealth concentrations above a billion euros.

On top of that would come a special one-time wealth tax, also on a
graduated scale, that would only impact Germans sitting on fortunes
worth more than 2 million euros. This levy’s top rate would hit 30
percent for awesomely affluent Germans in the proposal’s highest
wealth bracket.

Germany’s super rich would also see, under the _Die Linke _plan, a
higher inheritance tax on the wealth they leave behind. On the annual
income side, top corporate executives and other high-earners would
face a 75-percent tax rate on their take-homes over a million euros.

The fifth and final plank of the _Die Linke_ plan: replacing the
current 25-percent flat tax on capital gains — the income from the
sale of financial and other assets — with a graduated sliding scale
of rates.

The overall goal of the _Die Linke_ tax plan: a halving of the
wealth of Germany’s wealthiest over the next decade. Three other
German parties on the left side of German politics are also backing
tax hikes on the wealthy, but at levels not nearly as significant
as _Die Linke_.

Elon Musk’s favorite German party, meanwhile, sees nothing wrong in
boosting the fortunes of Germany’s most fortunate. The
ultra-far-right Alternative for Germany party, the
Musk-backed _Alternative für Deutschland_, is pledging
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relief for capital gains and an end to Germany’s existing
inheritance tax.

Current polling is making
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former investment banker Friedrich Merz the favorite to become
Germany’s next chancellor. His conservative Christian Democratic
Union party favors lowering the corporate tax rate and is now polling
support from near 30 percent of Germany’s voters. Polls have the
anti-immigrant AfD at a bit over 20 percent.

_Die Linke _has been rising
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the pre-election polling since the party unveiled its tax plan, and
the party gained
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new members in January. Analysts now see the party likely to finish
with about 6 percent of the overall vote tally, maybe enough to
prevent Germany’s right-wingers from forming a new government. But
the party’s bold tax plan, either way, has no shot at becoming the
law of the land in Germany’s next legislative session.

Still, what seems no more than tax-the-rich pie-in-the-sky in one
generation can become actual tax policy in the next. In 1917, for
instance, a bold group of American progressives proposed
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percent on annual income over $100,000, the equivalent of nearly $2.5
million in today’s dollars. A generation later, in 1942, President
Franklin Roosevelt asked
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to place that same 100-percent tax rate on America’s most affluent.

Lawmakers didn’t buy FDR’s 100-percent top rate, but they did pass
legislation that had America’s richest facing a 94-percent tax on
their top-bracket income by 1944. That U.S. top tax rate would hover
around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the
United States become the world’s first-ever mass-middle-class
nation.

_Sam Pizzigati__ writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy
Studies. __His latest book: __The Case for a Maximum Wage_
[[link removed]] _(Polity).
Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: __The Rich
Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created
the American Middle Class, 1900-1970_
[[link removed]] _ (Seven
Stories Press). _

* Billionaires
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* Elon Musk
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* Robin Hood Tax
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* Germany
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