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CLAMORING TO TAX THE RICH  
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Harold Meyerson
September 22, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ In Berkeley, New York, Paris, and Vatican City, it’s become
central to political battles—and religious concerns. _

Parisians march in the streets over France’s national budget,
September 18, 2025., Stephane Lemouton/Sipa via AP Images

 

The gap between public needs and public revenues, between the incomes
of the rich and the incomes of everyone else, continues to widen. New
York may be home to more than 100 billionaires, but most of the
city’s parents struggle to afford child care for their preschoolers.
Paris is home to the world’s wealthiest merchants of luxury goods,
but the government is threatening to enact budget cuts
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would reduce funding to hospitals and schools in order to balance its
budget.

In those two cities, democratic socialists are proposing similar
solutions that have widespread popular support. In New York,
Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who has a commanding lead
in the polling for November’s election, has proposed increasing the
income tax on city residents with incomes over $1 million by two
percentage points, with the proceeds to go to free universal child
care and free bus travel. (The state government would have to approve
that increase.) In Paris, the nation’s Socialist Party is demanding
a 2 percent tax on wealth in excess of 100 million euros, which would
close the nation’s projected budget deficit without cuts to social
spending, as a condition for supporting the government of the newly
appointed prime minister.

The architect of the French socialists’ proposal, for which hundreds
of thousands of demonstrators have clogged the streets of Paris
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other cities in recent days, is Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor
at the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley, and a frequent
collaborator with Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty on papers that deal
with the actual rates of taxation on the rich and everybody else. In
2021, when I profiled
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Economics Department for the _Prospect_, I noted that the department
was at the forefront of a shift in the discipline, from positing
theories to reporting on actual data (led by department chair David
Card, whose work with Alan Krueger on the effect of minimum-wage hikes
on employment, which turned out to be negligible, was to win him the
Nobel Prize). Piketty, Saez, and Zucman’s work on the preceding
century of income tax payments in the United States was both
revelatory and, for economics professors, revolutionary. Zucman
carried such research even further by documenting the volume and rate
of income tax evasion through the rich shifting their income to
nations that are tax havens—for which he was awarded the John Bates
Clark Medal for producing the most significant work by an economist
under 40.

Today, Zucman has become a household name in France: The Socialists’
proposal is commonly known as the Zucman Tax, and he is all but
ubiquitous on French media in defense of the proposal. Not
surprisingly, that tax has come under intense attack by France’s
billionaires, some of whom have termed it “communist.” Zucman has
responded by noting that it would indeed be communist if it took 100
percent of their wealth, but taking 2 percent falls 98 percent short
of that. Like their French peers, many of New York’s billionaires
have predicted the fall of civilization if their taxes are raised, but
it’s similarly hard to see how raising the city’s current rate of
10.9 percent for single filers on that portion of their yearly incomes
in excess of $25 million to 12.9 percent would bring the walls of the
temple tumbling down.

A 2024 Data for Progress poll found that 80 percent of likely voters,
including 71 percent of Republicans, supported an excessive CEO pay
tax on corporations.

The current demand for fairer taxes is hardly limited to these two
capitals of global capital. On September 15, Vermont Sen. Bernie
Sanders, joined by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (MA), Chris Van
Hollen (MD), Peter Welch (VT), Ed Markey (MA), and 23 members of the
House of Representatives, introduced a bill
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would raise taxes on corporations whose CEOs make obscenely more than
their median-paid employee. Noting that in the 1960s and ’70s, CEOs
made roughly 20 times what their median employee made, Sanders cited
the results of the most recent yearly survey by the Securities and
Exchange Commission, which showed that the CEOs of the 350 largest
publicly owned firms made on average 290 times what their average
worker made in 2024. Their proposal would kick in for corporations
whose CEOs made at least 50 times their average employee, with a
corporate tax increase of 0.5 percent, rising in steps to 5 percent
for corporations whose CEOs made more than 500 times their median
employee. The legislation also includes a penalty tax for corporations
that shift the status of their workers from “employee” to
“independent contractor” to avoid liability.

Lest you think that such stratospheric ratios are a rarity,
Sanders’s office reports that there were 57 corporations in 2024
where the ratio was higher than 1,000-to-1. Tesla’s board, for
instance, recently awarded Elon Musk a $29 billion pay package
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which is on the order of 500,000 times more than the average Tesla
production associate
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and also offered him another pay package
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would sum to about $1 _trillion_—or about 20 million times more
than the production associate—at current stock prices, should he
meet certain goals.

In answering questions about this proposal, Sanders’s office notes
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Portland, Oregon, became the first jurisdiction to adopt such a tax
back in 2018. (Its author cold-called me to say he had first gotten
the idea for the tax by reading a 2014 column
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made the case for it, which had run in both the _Prospect _and _The
Washington Post_). Voters in San Francisco enacted that tax by
initiative in 2020, and in the first year it was put in place, 2023,
it raised roughly $100 million for city coffers.

Put on more such ballots, this kind of tax would have an excellent
chance of passing. A 2024 Data for Progress poll
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that 80 percent of likely voters, including 71 percent of Republicans,
supported an excessive CEO pay tax on corporations. And if you doubt
just how ecumenical the support for such a tax truly is, please note
that in the first interview
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given since becoming pope this spring, Pope Leo raised the topic of
Elon Musk’s all-but-unimaginable paychecks, saying that that level
of wealth undermines “the value of human life, of the family, of the
value of society.” He then went on to generalize his disapproval of
“the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working
class and the money that the wealthiest receive. CEOs that 60 years
ago might have been making four to six times what the workers are
receiving, the last figure I saw, it’s 600 times what average
workers are receiving.” (The actual numbers aren’t quite that
bad—see the SEC ratios, above—but we can forgive Leo for some
heartfelt exaggeration here, even should the Trump administration move
to compel the media not to cover him for his efforts to undermine
capitalism and disparage fortunes like Trump’s.)

As Democrats hone their economic platforms between now and 2028, this
kind of proposal could help them in multiple ways. It provides a
readily understood portal into the vast disparities in income and
wealth that the public generally underestimates, not to mention
aligning the Democrats with a still all-too-inchoate public sentiment
that the party of Donald Trump does not and cannot share. Aligns
Democrats with Pope Leo, too. What’s not to like?

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

* Economic Policy
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* Tax policy
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* wealth tax
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