Arguing for the billionaire wealth tax

For NYT Opinion, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman make a case for a billionaire wealth tax in California.

The billionaire class in California includes roughly 250 households, a mere 0.001 percent of the state’s families. Yet its wealth now amounts to more than half of California’s entire annual economic output.

This means that if these billionaires spent all of their wealth, they could buy more than half of the goods and services produced in a year in the entire state.

This extraordinary wealth does not translate into extraordinary tax contributions.

They use a tip-of-the-iceberg visual metaphor to show the relatively modest taxes on income against the majority of wealth beneath the surface in assets. California wants to charge a 5% tax on the entire iceberg spread out over a five-year period.