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'I Know Where I Want to Live': Ex-Venture Capitalist Explains Why He'd Be Happy to Pay California Billionaire Tax
"I believe it's a patriotic duty to pay taxes, and I do so with pride. Our tax system favors wealthy people, and the least we can do is pay up rather than try to avoid it."
Oct 01, 2026
As some of California's richest residents pour tens of millions of dollars into defeating a proposed billionaire tax, one former venture capitalist is making a remarkably different argument: He is perfectly happy to pay it—and he's not alone.
John O'Farrell, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explained Wednesday in a 12-post thread on the social media platform X why he supports the California Billionaire Tax Act, commonly known as Proposition 40, which is on the state's November midterm ballot.
O'Farrell's argument contradicts the chorus of Silicon Valley billionaires and their allies who warn that taxing billionaire wealth would drive the ultra-rich out of California.
"I know where I want to live," he wrote.
"I've been fortunate to benefit from tech wealth. I'm not even close to being a billionaire, but I could easily afford to pay the wealth tax—and any billionaire certainly can—without the slightest effect on my lifestyle," O'Farrell said. "I support a wealth tax at my wealth level also."
Introduced by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, Prop 40 would impose a one-time 5% levy on people worth $1 billion or more, with an option to pay the tax in annual installments of 1% over five years.
The proposal would require the state to spend 90% of revenue from the tax on healthcare and the rest on food assistance and public education. Proponents say the tax would raise roughly $100 billion in revenue. Critics argue that it could drive wealthy residents and investment from California and stall economic growth.
"I find the knee-jerk opposition of some ultra-wealthy people to the idea of paying any new tax deeply disappointing," O'Farrell said in his thread. "To be honest, I can't understand it. They have so much money they couldn't spend it in multiple lifetimes."
Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies—a Washington, DC-based progressive think tank—exposed 22 California billionaires who have poured more than $150 million into defeating Prop 40, "with more rolling in every day," as Chuck Collins wrote for the group.
"These 22 include a prince, several private jet-flying chums of Jeffrey Epstein, and a bunch of crypto and tech bros designing the [artificial intelligence] future for the rest of us," Collins noted. "On January 1, 2025, these 22 billionaires had a combined wealth of $439.8 billion. By September 1, 2026, their wealth had grown to $722.1 billion. In a little under 20 months, their combined wealth increased $282.6 billion, a gain of over 64%."
O'Farrell's social media thread pointed out how "our tax system favors wealthy people."
"I believe it's a patriotic duty to pay taxes, and I do so with pride," he wrote, adding, "the least we can do is pay up rather than try to avoid it."
"Paying taxes is ultimately a matter of self-interest," he contended. "What kind of society do we want to live in? One that rewards achievement but also emphasizes fairness and opportunity for all—or one in which you have to cower in a bunker and live in fear of the pitchforks?"
"One enables the pursuit of happiness for all," he concluded. "The other, just the pursuit of endless wealth."
Prop 40 is backed by numerous progressive groups including the Teamsters union, California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and Our Revolution, as well as individual progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and Democratic congressional candidate Connie Chan, who is running to replace retiring longtime San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
Sanders, Khanna, and others—including Congresswoman Aisha Wahab (D-Calif.), Democratic congressional candidate Randy Villegas, and California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim—are set to speak at a series of rallies for Prop 40 starting Saturday in San Francisco.
O'Farrell isn't the only wealthy Californian who supports Prop 40. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose fortune has soared into the hundreds of billions of dollars, has said he is “perfectly fine” with the proposed tax, telling Bloomberg that he and his family “chose to live in Silicon Valley” and that whatever taxes California applies, “so be it.”
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These 22 California Billionaires Don't Want to Pay Their Fair Share
A small segment of the state’s 200-plus billionaires has stepped up to oppose Prop 40, a ballot proposal to tax billionaires, contributing millions to opposition groups and vocally speaking out against the one-time fee.
Oct 01, 2026
On November 3, 2026, California voters will vote on Proposition 40, a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026. Ninety percent of the revenue would fund healthcare programs, with the remainder set aside for food assistance and education.
A small segment of the state’s 200-plus billionaires has stepped up to oppose Prop 40, contributing millions to opposition groups and vocally speaking out against the one-time fee.
In a brief report, California’s Billionaire Wealth Surge: Meet the 22 California Billionaires Opposing Prop 40 Billionaire Wealth Tax, we identified 22 California billionaires who are active funders and outspoken opponents of Prop 40. Together they have given over $150 million to oppose the initiative—with more rolling in every day. These 22 include a prince, several private jet flying chums of Jeffrey Epstein, and a bunch of crypto and tech bros designing the AI future for the rest of us.
Thiel’s wealth is 10,759 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
On January 1, 2025, these 22 billionaires had a combined wealth of $439.8 billion. By September 1, 2026, their wealth had grown to $722.1 billion.
In a little under 20 months, their combined wealth increased $282.6 billion, a gain of over 64%.
Just to be clear, these “snowflake billionaires” are whining, wailing, and donating money to fight a tax that would effectively require them to part with one-eighth of the wealth they’ve gained since January 1, 2025.
This group includes Google’s Sergey Brin who has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. Brin has seen his wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion on January 1, 2025 to $253 billion on September 1, 2026. Brin’s wealth is 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000.
Palantir’s Peter Thiel gave $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025 to $32.6 billion on September 1, 2026 (Forbes). Thiel’s wealth is 10,759 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Chris Larsen, founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple, has given over $5 million to the No on Prop 40 Campaign, along with another $5 million from Ripple and $12 million to Building a Better California. His personal wealth increased 23.5%, from $10.2 billion to $12.6 billion in the last 20 months. His wealth is 4,158 times the wealth of the median California family.
Venture capitalist John Doerr gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025 to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Three of the 20 saw their wealth decline over this 20-month period: Tony Xu, Marc Pincus, and Marco DeGeorge. But most have experienced substantial gains.
California Billionaires vs. the Median California Household
The number of billionaires in California has grown, with their average wealth remaining roughly between $9.1 to $9.4 billion. As of September 1, 2026, the 231 billionaires identified as living in California have a combined wealth of $2.117 trillion. Just 20 months ago, there were 178 billionaires in California with a combined wealth of $1.685 trillion.
To show how quickly billionaire wealth has accelerated since the pandemic, let’s go back in time six years. In early 2020, all 815 billionaires residing in the United States had a combined wealth of $2.9 trillion, only slightly more than what the 231 California billionaires have today in 2026.
Meanwhile, the median net worth of a California household has risen a marginal 5.2% increasing $15,000 from $288,000 in 2025 to $303,000 in 2026. A Californian with $1 billion dollars in wealth has 303 times the wealth of the median California household.
Under Prop 40, this billionaire will pay a one-time tax of $50 million to support healthcare, education, and food assistance for their fellow Californians leaving them $950 million to survive on.
The Under-Taxed California Billionaire
In California, the state’s 231 billionaires (as of Sept 1, 2026) hold approximately $2.117 trillion in wealth ($2.3 trillion as of Sept 22, 2026) and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches.
According to an analysis published by economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid, on average, just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and Larry Page paid just 0.07% of their wealth annually in California income tax during that period. I guess we can see why they don’t want anything to change.
This analysis was prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies and Tax the Ultra-Rich Now (TURN). More detailed dossiers will be available soon. Press release HERE.
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An IPCC for Inequality Is Good, But It Can't Replace the Movement That Made It Possible
The gap between rich and poor will not be closed in a seminar room, it will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
Sep 25, 2026
For years, the people organizing against extreme inequality have made a simple argument that the world’s institutions preferred not to hear: The gap between the very rich and everyone else is not an accident, not a law of nature, and not something we have to accept. It is a choice, made by people with the power to choose differently.
For a long time that was a fringe position. It isn’t any more.
You can see the shift in the news that South Africa is pushing to create an International Panel on Inequality, like an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the wealth gap, to pull the evidence together in one authoritative place and put it in front of governments. Joseph Stiglitz backs it. More than 500 economists have signed on.
Nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.
This is a good thing, and we welcome it. When the establishment builds an institution to take your issue seriously, it means the argument is being won. The people who got this far deserve credit.
But I want to be honest about where the real momentum is coming from, because it matters for what happens next. The panel is a sign of progress. It is not the engine of it. The engine is the movement that dragged inequality up the agenda in the first place, and that movement is where the story of actual change has been written.
Look at what the IPCC has actually done so far. For 30 years it has produced the best climate science anyone had ever assembled. It won a Nobel Prize. It leaves no room for honest denial. And for a long time, governments read it and carried on much as before. The science mattered enormously.
However, it moved politics fastest when people forced it to: kids walking out of school on Fridays for the Future, communities blocking fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline. The movement was decisive. Change came when the two worked together, and not a moment before.
Inequality is in the same place as the climate crisis now—the evidence is not the thing we are short of. We already know the shape of it. The richest 1% took 41% of all the new wealth created between 2000 and 2024. Around 2.3 billion people, nearly 1 in 4 of us, now skip meals because they can’t afford to eat. South Africa, which is carrying this panel forward, is the most unequal country the World Bank has ever recorded.
A panel will sharpen that picture, and sharper is better. But nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.
Here is the encouraging part: That pressure is already working.
When Brazil used its G20 presidency to put a global tax on billionaires on the table, it did not come from nowhere. Movements, campaigners, and economists had pushed the idea for years, and the Fight Inequality Alliance was part of that.
The economist Gabriel Zucman drew up a plan: a 2% minimum tax on the world’s roughly 3,000 billionaires, enough to raise around $250 billion a year. In November 2024, for the first time, G20 leaders agreed to cooperate on taxing the ultra rich. An idea dismissed as impossible a few years earlier was suddenly the position of the world’s largest economies.
That is what movements do. They move the line of what is politically possible, and they do it faster than any institution.
This is why the movement matters, and why its role in this next chapter should be front and center. We are the ones knocking on the doors, running the campaigns, and keeping the pressure on long after the summit is over and the experts have gone home.
We have been doing it without a panel, and we have already moved things many said could not be moved. Give that movement the authoritative evidence a body like this can provide, and you do not only get a better report. You get a sharper weapon in the hands of the people already fighting.
The tax has not been won yet. The United States and Germany refused to back a binding version, and it was watered down to a promise to cooperate. But notice why.
It did not stall for lack of evidence. Zucman had done the numbers, and nobody serious disputed them. It stalled because the people who would pay still had the power to slow it down. That is the real contest, and it is not a contest of data. It is a contest of power, and power is shifted by organized people, not by publications.
I say all this as someone who spends more time with campaigners than with economists, and I will be honest about our own side too.
Movements do not win every time. We are sometimes better at naming a problem than at holding the ground we take. But the lesson of the last decade is not that we need fewer people in the fight and more in the seminar room. It is the opposite. The evidence has been overwhelming for years. What has changed the weather is people refusing to accept it.
So build this panel well, and build it close to the movement that made it necessary. Let it answer the questions people are actually fighting over. Get its evidence into the hands of the people doing the pushing. Check whether it does speak to the inequalities and the solutions people are talking about and demanding change for. Treat the organizers and the communities living this every day as partners in the work, not an audience for the findings. Do that, and this panel becomes part of something genuinely powerful.
Because the gap will not be closed in a seminar room. It never has been. It will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
The evidence is on our side. It has been for a long time. Now comes the part that actually changes lives.
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House Republicans Pitch a Plan to Cut Social Security to Billionaire Donor Harlan Crow
If Republicans want to cut our earned benefits, the American people deserve for them to tell us that to our faces, rather than weaseling around the job they were elected to do, and for which they earn a handsome salary.
Sep 23, 2026
This Monday, House Republicans held a hearing focused on creating a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare. The hearing was for an audience of one: billionaire donor Harlan Crow.
That’s the same Harlan Crow who infamously treated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to lavish vacations, along with donating millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes.
Republicans wanted to keep the hearing quiet, so they held it far from Washington DC. This was a “field hearing,” held all the way in Dallas, Texas. Specifically, it was held at Old Parkland, a “business campus” owned by none other than Harlan Crow.
Crow and his friends will do anything to cut our hard-earned Social Security benefits so that they never have to pay their fair share into the system.
Normally, when Congress holds a field hearing, they are seeking testimony from members of the general public. But when I showed up with Texas seniors and people with disabilities, they refused to let us in. Medically vulnerable people were forced to wait outside in 100°F heat.
Republicans claimed that there were only three chairs available for members of the public. That was a lie. When I finally made it into the room, there was plenty of space. And while there were “no seats available” for seniors and people with disabilities, guess who got one? Harlan Crow.
I called out the hearing for what it was: a farce designed to cut Social Security, even though Social Security doesn’t add a single penny to the debt. I reminded Republicans that the real driver of the debt is tax breaks for billionaires like Harlan Crow. I was promptly escorted out by police
Michelle H. Davis, author of the Substack Lone Star Left, was denied a seat. So she went home and watched the entire three-hour hearing. Davis writes that Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) ended the hearing by personally thanking Harlan Crow:
Arrington turned, and addressed Harlan by first name, called him "friend" and "great patriot," thanked "his family," and joked about moving every future Budget Committee hearing to Old Parkland permanently.
Davis also found that several members of the House Budget Committee, including Arrington, have received substantial donations from Crow.
As witnesses, the Republicans brought in retired Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who were pushing an infamous fast-track bill to avoid political accountability for cutting our earned benefits. Both this hearing and the commission itself are mechanisms to manufacture a consensus that does not exist in the American people. That’s why they try so hard to silence the voices of real Americans.
Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made the argument for a commission in terms that explicitly laid out the cowardice of our political class:
I think there would be nothing better than if a group of elected members on the budget committee were willing to sit down and develop a comprehensive approach to deficit reduction. That would be great. But I also understand the politics of the time... the politics of both sides would basically stab you in the back. I mean that's a reality. But that doesn't mean that you walk away from the problem.
But Panetta misstates what the two sides are. Voters for both parties will revolt at any attempt to cut Social Security, while the Wall Street and Big Tech megadonors who fund Republicans are the ones who repeatedly insist that it must be done.
The truth is, nobody wants to cut Social Security benefits except for a handful of Republicans and the billionaires on Wall Street who tell them what to do. That’s why it’s no surprise that this farce of a hearing was all for the benefit of billionaire donor Harlan Crow.
If Republicans want to cut our earned benefits, the American people deserve for them to tell us that to our faces, rather than weaseling around the job they were elected to do, and for which they earn a handsome salary. These politicians are afraid to do that because Americans are so overwhelmingly opposed to Social Security cuts.
Billionaires like Harlan Crow want Social Security cuts by any means necessary because once benefits are cut, they can stop worrying that we will finally make them pay their fair share.
We’ve been fighting commissions for a long time. I got started with Social Security Works live streaming the closed door behind which the 2010 Bowles-Simpson commission discussed its proposals to cut Social Security. Eventually, commission co-chair Alan Simpson stepped out from behind his closed door and gave an impromptu interview in which he called Social Security beneficiaries “the lesser people.”
Sixteen years later, that’s still how Republicans and their billionaire donors view seniors and people with disabilities. Crow and his friends will do anything to cut our hard-earned Social Security benefits so that they never have to pay their fair share into the system. But this week, we crashed Crow’s private hearing and reminded the billionaires that we’re never going to let that happen.
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In Riverside Church Address, Sanders Warns 'Dangerous Global Oligarchy' Threatens Humanity
"If there was ever a time in human history, in our country and throughout the world, that we have got to come together and create a world not based on greed but based on justice, based on decency, now is the time."
Sep 22, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders warned in a speech late Monday that the world is hurtling toward "an extremely dangerous global oligarchy" whose unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power endangers democratic institutions, the environment, and humanity's collective future as artificial intelligence rapidly advances.
"The oligarchs of today, worth hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, having investments all over the world, fervently believe that they are the masters of the universe, and that they, through their enormous wealth and power, have been ordained to rule the world," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an address at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a famous speech condemning the Vietnam War. "Today we say to those oligarchs: This country, this world, belongs to all of us, not just you."
Sanders used his remarks, delivered as world leaders arrived in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, to decry a massively unequal status quo under which political leaders cater to the needs of billionaire donors and corporate interests rather than the broader population, whose wages are being swallowed by rising costs and whose communities are increasingly devastated by pollution and war.
Sanders also warned about the rise of "right-wing demagogues" who are exploiting real material struggles and government failures to advance nefarious agendas that pit "working people against each other based on the color of their skin, where they were born, or their religion."
"Instead of producing more bombs and weapons and seeing the military-industrial complex enjoy huge profits, governments throughout the world need to come together to feed the children, take care of the vulnerable, and protect our planet from the ravages of climate change," said Sanders, calling for an end to US military assistance to Israel, which is using American-made weaponry to carry out its genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip.
"Never before in human history have so few people held so much wealth and so much power, never before in human history have we had such enormous concentration of ownership," the senator said, warning that advancements in AI technology could dramatically intensify the crises facing humanity if control isn't wrested from "a handful of Big Tech oligarchs."
Watch Sanders' full speech:
Sanders called on US President Donald Trump, a billionaire who has dismissed warnings about the threats posed by AI, and Chinese President Xi Jinping to "begin the process of negotiating a comprehensive treaty to establish a pause on advanced AI and a ban on AI superintelligence" when the leaders meet this week.
The progressive senator also cautioned against "despair and depression" in the face of pressing global challenges, saying, "We got to stand up, we got to fight back, we've got to create the kind of nation and world that you and I know we can create."
"If there was ever a time in human history, in our country and throughout the world, that we have got to come together and create a world not based on greed but based on justice, based on decency, now is the time," said Sanders.
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Nobel-Winning Economists Say California Billionaire Tax Could Be ‘Turning Point in the Battle Between Democracy and Oligarchy’
“What will allow California to thrive in the future," the economists said, "is not letting a handful of billionaires live tax-free: it is adequate public spending on health, education, and public infrastructure, key engines of economic growth."
Sep 21, 2026
As California voters head to the polls this November, their vote on whether to enact a first-of-its-kind billionaire wealth tax may mark "a turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy," says a group of Nobel Prize-winning economists.
The fight over Proposition 40—a ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of those with $1 billion or more in order to fund the state's healthcare system—has heated up in recent weeks.
The initiative remains popular, with 52% of voters in the state supporting it, according to a poll out last week. But California's elite have lined up at least $156 million behind an aggressive campaign to kill it, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone giving at least $102 million.
And while the proposal has strong backing from progressive politicians and labor unions, some prominent Democrats have tried to stop it, most notably Gov. Gavin Newsom.
As the rich flood the airwaves with ads warning that taxing their wealth would bring about economic ruin, six Nobel laureates, all of whom have won the prestigious prize for their work in economics, signed an open letter on Saturday endorsing Prop. 40.
They are inequality scholar Daron Acemoglu, global poverty researcher Abhijit Banerjee, labor and public finance economist Peter Diamond, anti-poverty economist Esther Duflo, trade economist and columnist Paul Krugman, and inequality and globalization economist Joseph Stiglitz.
"Proposition 40 would be the first-ever tax on billionaire wealth enacted anywhere in the world," the economists wrote. "California is the right place to take this historic step."
They explained that the growing number of billionaires in the state in recent decades has helped to make California "one of the most unequal places in America." While the state's richest 0.001% of residents were worth a combined $700 billion a decade ago, its 250 billionaires are now worth about $2.3 trillion—equivalent to the entire annual income of the state's 20 million taxpayers.
"This extreme wealth has translated into extraordinary power," the economists wrote, citing data showing that during the 2024 election, billionaires accounted for 19% of all federal election spending in the US and that these same billionaires are now marshaling huge sums of money to oppose a tax that would affect them.
While acknowledging that many of California's wealthiest have "made important contributions, for which they have been amply rewarded," the researchers noted their use of loopholes in the tax system to effectively pay a lower tax rate than the average Californian.
Most billionaire wealth is held in the form of stocks and other assets whose gains are not generally subject to income tax until they are sold.
As a result, billionaires in the state paid about $3 billion in state income taxes per year from 2019-25, while their fortunes increased by about $1.4 trillion over the period. Dividing total state income tax by that increase equals roughly 1.6%. Meanwhile, the average California family pays about 5-6% of their annual income in state income taxes.
The economists argued that enacting a wealth tax would allow the state to play "catch-up," raising about $100 billion—enough to offset federal cuts to the state's Medicaid program enacted in the Republican budget legislation last year, which have helped to fuel thousands of layoffs at hospitals around the state.
They also disputed a common counterargument that the tax will spur billionaire flight from the state and "doom" Silicon Valley.
Not only would the tax apply to any billionaire living in the state as of January 1, 2026, meaning most would not have had time to relocate; they also pointed out that in 2026, after Prop. 40 was announced, California has attracted 80% of the nation's venture capital funding, compared to just 50% prior to 2025, according to data from PitchBook's Venture Monitor.
“What will allow California to thrive in the future," the economists said, "is not letting a handful of billionaires live tax-free: It is adequate public spending on health, education, and public infrastructure, key engines of economic growth to which it is only fair to ask the ultrawealthy to contribute.”
They added that passing Prop. 40 "isn’t just critical for Californians," but could "kickstart a movement to tax ultra-high-net-worth individuals in other states—and eventually at the federal level and in other countries."
The six Nobel laureates who signed Saturday's letter are not the first prominent economists to publicly advocate for the wealth tax. University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez helped draft the proposal, while Gabriel Zucman, a chaired professor at the Paris School of Economics, has conducted research underpinning it. Paris School professor Thomas Piketty and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich have also come out in support of the ballot initiative.
Responding to the letter from the Nobel laureates, Dutch historian and wealth tax advocate Rutger Bregman—whose School for Moral Ambition has worked alongside Zucman to promote similar initiatives around the world—said it was "really great to see" more celebrated economists speaking up in favor of the proposal.
"You don't have to be a radical leftist to see why it's a good idea," Bregman wrote on social media. "This is not going to be some kind of socialist revolution. The proposal is about restoring balance to a mixed economy. You could even argue it's about saving capitalism itself from oligarchs like Sergey Brin. I think that's exactly why Nobel Prize-winning economists are coming out in favor of this tax."
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15 Years After Occupy, the Case Against the System Has Never Been Clearer
The 1%’s record wealth and the 99%’s rising cost of living are not two distinct stories. They are one transaction, and we are on the paying end of it.
Sep 19, 2026
As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations.
On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting.
The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.
Here is the lesson of the last decades, and the reason for hope: Every time the powerful have declared this movement finished, it has returned larger, sharper, and more connected than before.
That demand lands differently when you cannot afford the basics of life. In Seattle, the debate centred on trade rules. Today, people are doing the maths as they stand in front of a grocery food shop not knowing what they can afford to buy, tackle rents that consume the entire salary, and face energy bills that arrive like a threat. What was once an abstraction has become a household emergency.
Seattle did not come from nowhere. Five years earlier, the Zapatistas had risen in Southern Mexico on the day a free trade deal took effect, declaring that ordinary people had a right to refuse the terms being set for them from above.
The Jubilee movement had brought millions of people onto the streets and into churches to demand the cancellation of crushing debts owed by the world’s poorest countries.
By 2001 a hundred thousand people were meeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil under the banner “another world is possible,” and that same year a young man named Carlo Giuliani was shot dead protesting the G8 in Genoa, Italy.
The powerful learned early that this movement would not simply ask politely. It would demand systemic change.
Then came the crash. In 2008, the same financial system that had been sold to us as untouchable collapsed, and ordinary people were handed the bill while the bankers who broke it kept their bonuses. Out of that betrayal came the next great wave of action.
2011 brought Tahrir Square, the Spanish Indignados, the Greek fight against austerity, the Chilean students, and, in September, a small camp in the shadow of Wall Street.
The Occupy Wall Street movement gave the whole movement its slogan—“We are the 99%.” A single phrase that did what a thousand policy papers could not. The protesters drew the line. There is them, and there is the rest of us, and the rest of us are almost everyone.
Occupy’s camp was eventually cleared. Critics declared the moment over, the movement a failure, the slogan a fad. Look closer and you see something different.
The 1% have the money. We have the numbers, the history, and the truth.
The idea did not die. It moved into the bloodstream of public life. The language of the 1% vs the 99% is now spoken in parliaments and kitchens alike. Ideas once dismissed as fringe—taxing extreme wealth, cancelling illegitimate debt, treating billionaires as a policy problem rather than a national mascot—are now argued seriously by economists and demanded openly in the streets.
That is what a movement can do over time. Shift what people believe is normal, and then shift what they believe is possible.
We need that long memory now, because the case against the system has never been clearer. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth hit a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, growing three times faster than in the previous five years, while the number of billionaires surpassed 3,000 for the first time in history. The richest 1% now own almost 44% of all the world’s wealth, while the poorest half of humanity holds barely half of 1% of all the world’s wealth.
Just 12 men hold more wealth than 4 billion people combined. Elon Musk recently became the first person in history to be worth a trillion dollars, in a world where 1 in 4 people goes hungry. This is not the weather. It is a result of a system, engineered by people with names and addresses who have rigged the rules in their own favor.
The other side of that ledger is the bill the rest of us pay. The same years that added a trillion to the top produced rents nobody can pay and food prices that climb faster than wages.
The 1%’s record wealth and the 99%’s rising cost of living are not two distinct stories. They are one transaction, and we are on the paying end of it. In the United States, rents across major cities have risen by more than a third since 2020, the cost of living now tops the list of voters’ concerns, and in 2025 Zohran Mamdani became mayor on an affordability platform in the very city where Occupy began.
And the wealthy know they are exposed, which is why they are buying protection. The super rich are now 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than the rest of us, and they have spent freely to capture the media, the courts, and the politics that might otherwise hold them to account. When wealth concentrates like this, democracy thins out. The fight against inequality and the fight for democracy are the same fight.
Here is the lesson of the last decades, and the reason for hope: Every time the powerful have declared this movement finished, it has returned larger, sharper, and more connected than before. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded new anti-government protests in more than 70 countries in 2025.
The young people filling the streets today are not starting from zero. They stand on the shoulders of Seattle, Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, every square that was ever cleared, every campaign that was ever written off. And they are not marching over an abstraction. They are marching because the cost of a decent life has been priced out of reach while a few thousand people got richer than anyone in history.
So this one goes out to Gen Z, in every city and every country where the numbers no longer add up. Your time is now. You did not break this economy. You inherited the bill for it. Enough is enough.
The 1% have the money. We have the numbers, the history, and the truth. The only question that has ever mattered is whether we organize. Every generation before answered yes. Now it is yours to answer, and the world is waiting to hear it.
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Working-Class Taxpayers Subsidize Billionaires' Climate-Killing Private Jets: Report
"It’s time to stop making taxpayers subsidize luxury private jet travel and use our resources to green other industries," said one of the report's authors.
Sep 18, 2026
A handful of the world's wealthiest people are traveling aboard some of the planet's most polluting vehicles while receiving substantial public subsidies, according to a new report documenting how taxpayers and commercial airline passengers are funding billionaires' private jet lifestyles due to corporate lobbying, tax breaks, and other policies.
The Institute for Policy Studies' (IPS) "High Flyers 2026: The High Cost of Private Jet Excess," released on Friday, notes that only about 256,000 people around the world—roughly 0.003% of the global population—fly on private jets. Yet these ultrawealthy travelers account for a disproportionate share of aviation activity while paying a fraction of the taxes that fund air traffic infrastructure.
According to the report—which is co-authored by Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Kalena Thomhave, and Emily Wagner—private jets and charter services account for roughly 16% of flight operations handled by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), while noncommercial private jets account for about 7% of airspace activity.
NEW: Private jet travel — the most ecologically destructive form of transportation — is increasing among the wealthiest 0.003% of people. Taxpayers and commercial flyers are subsidizing it.It's time to tax this reckless consumption. REPORT:
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— Institute for Policy Studies (@ips-dc.org) September 18, 2026 at 6:05 AM
However, private jets contribute less than 0.6% of the taxes flowing into the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which helps finance FAA operations.
"We all pay for the harms of private jet excess," the report states. "US taxpayers and commercial air travelers subsidize the luxury private jet transportation sector. Private jets fail to pay their fair share of their use of airspace and the costs of their carbon pollution, shifting the burden to everyone else."
The disparity is particularly stark when the climate consequences of private aviation are taken into account. IPS found that a passenger traveling by private jet is responsible for roughly 10 to 14 times the emissions of a passenger on a commercial airline and around 50 times those of a passenger traveling the same route by rail. On some low-carbon rail systems, the disparity can exceed 200-fold.
"Private jets are the super-polluters. On a warming planet, private jet operations are indefensible," the report's authors wrote. "Private jets account for a small sliver of aviation activity, but they are the most polluting form of transport and represent the fastest-growing segment of aviation emissions."
The report also found that at least half of private jet operations are for recreational, vacation, and personal luxury travel.
"The ultrarich and greedy corporations are private jet-setting at the expense of the rest of us," Collins told The Guardian on Friday. "The rest of us should not have to pay for the luxury excess of the private jet billionaire class."
The report comes amid increasing criticism of tax policies that have made private aircraft particularly lucrative investments for wealthy Americans. Last year, US President Donald Trump signed legislation permanently implementing 100% bonus depreciation for qualifying business assets, allowing full tax deductions for certain purchases—including private aircraft—in the year they are acquired.
In a May opinion piece published by Common Dreams, Collins and Wagner slammed what they described as "a massive tax break for billionaires and centimillionaires that use the most polluting form of transportation on the planet."
A corporation that buys a $50 million private jet could potentially deduct the entire purchase price from its taxes in the year of acquisition, meaning "ordinary taxpayers pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers," according to Collins and Wagner.
The Trump administration has also recently declined to close another tax loophole benefiting wealthy private jet users. A proposal by Democratic senators would have changed the rules governing the so-called Standard Industry Fare Level method for calculating the taxable value of personal flights aboard corporate aircraft. The lawmakers argued that the system allows wealthy executives to substantially undervalue their personal use nof company jets.
"While working families struggle to afford groceries, housing, and gas," Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said earlier this month, the Trump administration "focuses on tax breaks for billionaires—including tax breaks for private jets. What a disgrace."
The private jet industry has also benefited from efforts to shield aircraft owners from scrutiny. Earlier this year, House Republicans sought to restrict government use of flight tracking data that can help identify privately owned aircraft for taxation purposes.
“Oh look—Republicans helping private-jet billionaires avoid paying taxes," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) quipped in June. "If only they worked that hard for consumers.”
IPS noted the private aviation industry's substantial political influence. The National Business Aviation Association spent approximately $2 million lobbying for the sector in 2025, including on policies concerning tax breaks and private flight secrecy.
The report's authors list policy changes they say would help "decarbonize private jet users' indefensible behavior."
"A luxury tax of 10% on used jets and 5% on new jets could have raised more than $3 billion in 2025, funds that could be invested in sustainable ground transportation," they asserted.
"Congress should strip a private jet tax avoidance provision from the pending air traffic safety legislation, the ALERT Act," the authors argued.
The report also calls for:
- Stopping another pending private jet tax break;
- Repealing accelerated bonus depreciation of private jet purchases and passing the End Subsidies for Private Jets Act;
- Increasing taxes on private jet fuel;
- Rolling back secrecy provisions; and
- Ending funding and construction of new private jet infrastructure.
“Since we first released our analysis on the costs of private jet travel to taxpayers and the planet in 2023, we’ve seen a shocking and irresponsible rise in the use of private jet travel,” Ocampo said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the private jet lobby has worked hard to lower the tax obligations of the ultrawealthy," he added. "Meanwhile, the aviation industry pushes false solutions on the climate crisis. It’s time to stop making taxpayers subsidize luxury private jet travel and use our resources to green other industries.”
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If You Want to Tax the Rich, Support California's Proposed Wealth Tax
The state needs money to provide essential services. Why not take it from the people who have money coming out of their ears?
Sep 18, 2026
This fall, California residents will be voting on a measure that would impose a tax of 5% on people with wealth in excess of $1 billion. This is a serious tax on a small group of very wealthy people.
While some focus on the amount of tax that these super-rich people will pay, it’s worth keeping in mind how much they will still have after paying their tax bill. A billionaire with $5 billion in assets will pay $250 million in taxes, but they will still be left with $4,750,000,000. We probably still don’t have to worry about these folks collecting food stamps.
The proponents of the tax calculate that it will raise $100 billion. While it is a one-time tax, it can be paid over five years. This sum will roughly match the cuts in Medicaid funding over this period that the Trump administration has put in place.
It is important to recognize that capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. We have allowed the rich to structure it to give themselves all the money. That is a huge problem.
To me, this sounds like a great plan. The state needs money to provide essential services. Why not take it from the people who have money coming out of their ears?
Okay, but we know the real world is never this simple. The rich love their money and aren’t happy about turning over any portion of it to the state of California, no matter how little it affects their living standards. We have to ask how much money the tax will actually collect after the rich use all the tools available, both legal and illegal, to avoid paying.
The podcast Today Explained had an interesting discussion of this issue last week. It included comments from two economists who have done research on this issue: Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Cornell University. Rauh is a conservative, while Young is a liberal. Both have done serious work on taxing the rich.
Not surprisingly, Rauh opposed the wealth tax. He argued that the tax would end up as a net revenue loser. The tax would apply to billionaires who were in the state as of January 1 of this year, which means if they haven’t left the state already, they will still be liable for the tax even if they choose to leave later. But Rauh argues that the combination of lost future income tax revenue from the billionaires who have already left, combined with reduced collections from the billionaires who stay or don’t come to the state, will more than offset whatever revenue the state collects from the tax.
I take seriously the issues Rauh raises. Some billionaires have left the state. They also are very clever in finding ways to avoid taxes. Rauh did a paper a couple of years back that found that the rich managed to escape paying 60% of the anticipated tax revenue from a 3-percentage-point increase in the top tax rate paid by high-income people.
There clearly is some point where higher tax rates can actually result in less revenue, mostly due to increased evasion and avoidance, but there also is some negative incentive effect (definitely the smaller part of the story). Rauh’s work suggested California might not be far from that point. (Its top marginal tax rate is 13%.)
While Rauh’s view of the wealth tax was predictable, I was surprised to hear that Young also opposed it. Young has done considerable work that finds that rich people do not often move to escape higher state tax rates. It might have been expected that Young would think that the state does not have much to fear from billionaires leaving to escape the wealth tax.
However, Young opposed the tax on different grounds. He argued that the one-time infusion of revenue from the tax, collected over five years, would still leave a funding gap five years out, after the revenue stopped coming in.
This is hard for me to understand. Five years in Trump’s America in an eternity. It is reasonable to think that in five years we may again have a more normal government at the national level that is prepared to actually provide people with healthcare. In that case, the shortfall will not be an issue. Alternatively, if Trump and his followers still hold power, we are likely looking at a disaster story for which there is no real way to prepare.
There are a number of billionaires who very publicly left California before the start of the year and may thereby avoid the tax. This will reduce the revenue collected from the tax and will mean a loss of income tax revenue for the state in future years, but that is water under the bridge at this point.
We can all envision better ways to tax the rich in an ideal world. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the state wealth tax because he says we should have a federal wealth tax. Perhaps we should, but a state wealth tax is what’s on the table, and proponents of taxing the rich would be foolish not to wholeheartedly support it.
If the wealth tax goes down, California is not about to institute Young or anyone else’s ideal tax on the rich. If it goes down, it’s a pretty sure bet that it will be some time before another tax on the super rich in California comes this close to becoming law.
I will add that I have long argued that we need to structure the economy differently so that we don’t give the rich all the money. Having shorter and weaker government-granted patent and copyright monopolies would be a good start. Also, changing bankruptcy laws so that private equity partners can’t walk away from companies they bankrupted with their pockets full. And applying a modest sales tax on financial transactions would downsize the sector and eliminate many of the great fortunes on Wall Street.
This is the topic of my book, Rigged (it’s free). It is important to recognize that capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. We have allowed the rich to structure it to give themselves all the money. That is a huge problem. Taxing some of it back is a great thing to do, but it would be even better not to give them the money in the first place. That’s not a reason to oppose the tax, but it would be good if progressives paid some attention to fundamental issues of how we structure the market.
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The Power of the People Is Still the Most Important Power and Billionaires Know It
What kind of future can the people of Mexico, the US, and Canada build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
Sep 18, 2026
I have spent my life watching men in suits sign away things that were never theirs to sell. The North American Free Trade Agreement. Article 27 of Mexico’s Constitution. The land beneath the feet of the people who work it. Trade deals get written in rooms none of us are allowed into, then handed to us as done—take it, live with it, and don't ask who profited. That was the old playbook: theft dressed up as a benevolent "all boats rising" policy.
What's happening in 2026 is not quiet. Donald Trump is doing it all out loud, in broad daylight, on camera, daring anyone to stop him. And he's doing it right here in the USA.
Washington has long muted its professions of democratic faith whenever a compliant government was needed in Mexico or elsewhere around the world. Now, that corrosive indifference to core values is at work at home in the United States, with a terrifying array of targeted attacks on immigrant communities; judges stripped of the power to enforce basic civil procedure and defend what little protection people still have under this economic order; and the Orwellian vaporization of extensive scientific databases tracking climate change and other inconvenient truths.
The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become.
And that's before we even consider this administration's aggressive support for unchecked AI dominance with no regard for what it costs humanity, or the foolishly criminal forever war he started with Iran last February.
In the USA, the machinery of electoral democracy is itself under direct assault: career officials who once safeguarded elections purged and replaced with loyalists who deny elections happen fairly at all; Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned into something even The Washington Post now calls a paramilitary force; and a Pentagon chain of command purged of those considered most likely to obey their oath to the US Constitution at a time of shameless presidential power grab.
The shamelessness makes clear what used to be hidden. In Mexico, NAFTA was imposed with a rewritten constitutional article here, a side agreement there, with no teeth—so boring that no one ever looked into it too closely. Today’s openly hostile power grab made it impossible to keep pretending the arrangement could ever be fair..
What kind of future can we build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
It is precisely this vital conversation about our future—between people from Canada, USA, and Mexico—that the US administration is trying to shatter. We intend to have it anyway.
To create peace among our people we must work on removing the causes of conflict. We see the contradictions: inequality versus greed, misery versus excess, haves versus have nots. These are the contradictions democracy is supposed to be able to overcome by dictating that majorities rule policy and that there are constitutional protections for all. These principles have never worked as well as promised, but they have endured. Now they are under unprecedented attack.
For too long history has underlined the difference between our countries, and politicians have benefited from promoting rivalry and inequality. But today, it is clear that we are a cross-border majority suffering the consequences of a handful of billionaires.
Peace power requires a refreshed regional majority with new voices and decision-makers. A big tent where Black communities, Indigenous peoples, gun violence survivors, workers, and migrants from the three countries are treated as the pillars of democracy they already are. All represent communities who've never had the luxury of walking away from struggle, which is exactly why their vision and strength are vital to uniting our majority in the pursuit of peace and freedom.
The power of the people is still the most important power, and the billionaires know it. That's why they invested so much in turning news and information into a circus of conflict for a doomscrolling public. They need our attention even more than they need our votes. Let's give them neither. Every hour they capture is an hour we don't spend building the unity that can defeat them. Our power relies on our strength of community and thrives in places where people can put the phone down and just make common cause with their fellow humans.
That's why people across Minnesota, California, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York are organizing from the neighborhood to the state: to resist authoritarianism and reclaim power back to the people. And that’s why, this September, we're throwing up a big tent in two cities that share two countries and one river. El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become: one where the future isn't handed down from a boardroom or negotiated in a room we're not allowed into, but built, plainly and stubbornly, by the people who actually have to live it. One where democratic dialogue and a radical democracy is protected as a sacred value.
The future is in our hands.
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