Jubilee 2029

Three plans for a wealth tax:

  1. A radical global plan, if dozens of countries are willing to act together: a plan great enough to build a clean economy for the whole world with prosperity for all.
  2. A radical national plan, if the U.S. has to go it alone, that would fund the Mission for America and a century of fair prosperity.
  3. An endorsement of the most ambitious plan currently proposed in Congress, with eight amendments to make it stronger.

Across all of recorded history, extreme concentrations of wealth have almost never been undone peacefully. The leveling has come instead from what the historian Walter Scheidel calls the Four Horsemen: mass-mobilization war, violent revolution, state collapse, and plague. Today the concentration has rebuilt itself to the levels of 1914. About 117,000 people hold fortunes above $100 million, roughly $43 trillion in all, and the summer of 2026 produced the world's first trillionaire.

And a detonator is now wired to the pile: artificial intelligence. Mass layoffs are coming as AI displaces the work of hundreds of millions of people, while the wealth AI creates flows, under today's rules, to the same few thousand balance sheets. A moment is coming when millions of Americans, and billions of people around the world, will be in the streets demanding fundamental change. Without a way to mobilize forward on a massive scale (the Mission for America at home, a mission for humanity abroad) that moment ends in chaos. These are the plans that pay for the mobilization, and that deal a blow to an extreme inequality that is corroding democracy itself.

We publish our answer at three scales because the same idea has a different job to do in each arena. The world-scale plan extends the offer to every nation: it would be the first peaceful leveling in history, and it would fund a Marshall Plan for everybody. The national plan harvests everything above $100 million in America and capitalizes the rebuilding of American industry. And the nearest lane is the strongest wealth tax ever put before Congress, which we endorse and propose to finish. However far the politics can reach, the choice underneath is the same: you can have the Four Horsemen, or you can agree to be a centimillionaire.

The Three Proposals

The Global Jubilee cover
The World

The Global Jubilee

A global wealth tax to fund the building of a new clean world economy with prosperity for all

Every nation that can be persuaded joins a coordinated compact: a one-time harvest of all private wealth above $100 million per person, paid in shares rather than cash, followed by a permanent rule that no one passes more than $100 million to heirs. The proceeds, on the order of $30 trillion, endow mission-investment funds and a rebuilt system of development banks that finance clean energy, modern agriculture, clean water, and productive industry in every country on earth. It requires no world government: the compact runs on the same top-up architecture that already runs the global minimum corporate tax in more than 50 countries. It is the offer to do by choice what history has only ever done through catastrophe.

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The American Jubilee cover
America

The American Jubilee

How to pay for the Mission for America, a national project to build a clean economy with prosperity for all

America harvests, once, everything above $100 million: roughly $13 trillion from about 43,000 people, assessed at election-day values and paid in shares. The harvest capitalizes the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the public investment bank at the center of the Mission for America, supporting on the order of $40 to 65 trillion in financing for the ten-year rebuild of American energy, industry, housing, and infrastructure. Behind it stands the permanent rule that ends dynasties: get as rich as you want in your own lifetime, but nothing above $100 million passes to heirs, ever again. And as the money comes in, the taxes come off ordinary people: the harvest's earnings pay every worker's Social Security and Medicare contributions, and the income tax ends for the bottom 90 percent of earners.

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The Billionaire Wealth Tax endorsement cover
In Congress Now

The Billionaire Wealth Tax

Endorsing the Sanders–Khanna bill, with eight amendments to make it inescapable

New Consensus endorses the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna: a 5 percent annual tax on fortunes above $1 billion, with a federal wealth registry, a 50 percent audit floor, and a 60 percent exit tax. It is the strongest wealth tax ever put before Congress, and we want it to work, not just make a statement. So we read all 3,542 lines and stress-tested it against the tactics billionaires' lawyers will actually use. We propose eight amendments that close the trust pipeline, ban valuation games, armor the bill for court, and let it be paid in shares. It is the floor of the program, not the ceiling.

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