How does it make you feel to hear that there were 2,769 billionaires in 2024, an increase of 204 on the 2023 total? And that their combined wealth grew by around $2 trillion ($13 trillion to $15 trillion, or the equivalent of $5.7 billion a day), a rate three times faster than in 2023?

It's almost beyond comprehension. We've seen these statistics moving in the same direction for so long that we've become inured to the annual repetition- “for whosoever hath, more shall be given.” And we've simultaneously normalized the inevitability that these statistics will continue in the same direction, accepting that today's politicians (in both autocratic and democratic countries) appear to have neither the will nor the capacity to do anything to reverse that trend.

Elastic bands immediately come to mind: at some point, however many times one twists that band, it somehow stays intact- until it doesn't. Overstretched, as it were.

Is that process now underway in the USA, where the Trump Administration is systematically shifting wealth from the neediest and the middle class to fund further tax breaks for billionaires and aspirant trillionaires, including of course, Elon Musk?

Was the Associated Press/NORC poll in January indicating that only 12% of US citizens thought that the President relying on billionaires for policy advice was a good thing (20% of Republicans) the first early warning of overstretch?

Not least for the 3.5 billion people on Planet Earth (that's 44% of the world's population) who still get by on around $7 a day, a figure that has barely changed since 1990, according to the World Bank.

The USA is the epicenter of this economic trend. Stubbornly persistent adherence to the myth of the American Dream accounts for an almost inconceivable number of twists in that rubber band. But we're not immune here in the UK either. Oxfam’s annual audit of global wealth in January 2025 (“Takers not Makers”) revealed an increase of four billionaires in the UK in 2024 and a daily increase of £35 million a day in net worth. One in five UK citizens now live in poverty, and yet the super-rich still pay lower taxes than anyone else -including our former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose income of around £2.2 million in 2023 attracted a tax rate of around 20%. Two-thirds of the Patriotic Millionaires were quick to comment that today's billionaires have now become a major concern for democracy and stability around the world.

Intuitively, it's so obvious what the consequences of this look like- even if our political elites (in Labour as much as in the Tories) spurn such insights. A recent report from the Fairness Foundation (“Inequality Knocks”) revealed that more than 60% of UK citizens believe the rich have far too much influence in UK politics and that poverty and inequality are eroding the living conditions of people up and down the country. Fairness is fundamental to a functional society and democracy: “Growing inequality presents a genuine risk to the UK’s resilience, acting as both cause and amplifier of multiple societal challenges.” As a result, people are losing faith in our democracy, leading to “the very real possibility of societal breakdown.”

Over the top? Possibly. But polling insights are consistently stark: around 20% of UK voters under the age of 45 believe that our country would be “better off with a strong leader who doesn't have to bother about elections,” compared with only 8% of those over 45s.

It's the failure of the center-left to confront these issues when in power (in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Holland, and even in Scandinavian countries) that has paved the way for the rise of often xenophobic nationalist movements. As the economist Thomas Piketty puts it, “We seem to have given up on some ambitious continuation of the egalitarian agenda of making the most powerful economic actors accountable to democratic control, making them contribute to the public goods we need to fund.”

Whenever this model of capitalism fails (as it did in 2008) through a combination of economic austerity and populist scapegoating, citizens rightly become frustrated. But it’s the right wing that benefits from this frustration, with their devastatingly effective social media strategies emphasising people's loss of status and dignity. As well as the basic lack of fairness- caused, as we all know, primarily by their own policy prescriptions.

The impact on the young has been particularly harsh:

Secure jobs have evaporated, rents have escalated, wages have fallen, youth services have been reduced, and graduates face punishing debts for attending university. Younger Britons have suffered the brunt of policies that most never voted for. It's no wonder democracy seems increasingly unappealing.

(Owen Jones, writing in The Guardian on January 14th, 2025)

Western politicians must address this challenge – before authoritarianism turns into fascism the kind of fascism “that arise in fancy dress” as the poet Michel Rosen puts it.

Moreover, that demands one thing above all else: wealth taxes, both globally and in every Western country. The Global Solidarity Levies Task Force (led by France, Kenya, Barbados, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the African Union) is advocating for a targeted tax of 2% for today's 2,769 billionaires, which would bring in somewhere between $200 billion and $250 billion a year. By some calculations, this would affect no more than 100 extended families around the world- even if, as the Task Force wryly observes, implementation would be “very challenging.”

Here in the UK, the Patriotic Millionaires and New Economics Foundation have also suggested a 2% annual wealth tax on assets of more than £10 million, taxing income from wealth at the same level as income from work, effectively creating an “extreme wealth line” to match the UK’s “extreme poverty line.” Around 20,000 taxpayers in the UK would be affected, generating revenues of between £20 billion and £24 billion a year.

At the same time, closing loopholes in our much abused tax system is now an urgent necessity—Tax Justice UK estimates that closing down the five most egregious loopholes would generate between £5 billion and £7 billion a year.

That's what fair taxation looks like in a country like the UK, filling gaps in our public finances, reinstating the winter fuel allowance, removing the two-child benefit cap, restoring trust in basic fairness, increasing investment in sustainable infrastructure, and so on. And in the process, reinforcing the first line of defense around the integrity of our democratic processes and institutions keeping authoritarianism at bay.

It can be done. Since 2018, the Mexican government has undertaken many aggressive anti-poverty campaigns, driving down the income share of the country's top 1% of wealthy taxpayers. Trust in government has been significantly boosted, restoring faith in democracy even under huge political and economic pressure.