Part of Jubilee 2029, the New Consensus wealth tax program, published alongside the Global Jubilee and our endorsement of the Sanders–Khanna billionaire wealth tax.

The choice

For all of recorded history, extreme concentrations of wealth like America's have almost never been undone peacefully. The historian Walter Scheidel surveyed every great leveling from the Stone Age forward and found the same four causes every time: mass-mobilization war, violent revolution, state collapse, and plague.¹ The broad middle-class prosperity that Americans remember from the mid-twentieth century was not an accident of good feeling. It was built on the fiscal wreckage of two world wars: a 77 percent top estate tax, income tax rates near 90 percent, and 100 percent taxes on war profits.² Between 1914 and 1945 the largest American and European fortunes lost more than 90 percent of their value,³ and the country that emerged built the interstates, the GI Bill, and the widest middle class in world history.

Since 1980 the concentration has rebuilt itself. Roughly 43,000 Americans now hold fortunes above $100 million, worth about $13 trillion in total,⁴ and the summer of 2026 produced the world's first trillionaire.⁵ Meanwhile the ordinary American worker sends 7.65 percent of every paycheck to Washington from the first dollar earned⁴² and is told the country cannot afford to build anything.

And a detonator is now wired to the pile: artificial intelligence. Mass layoffs are coming as AI displaces the work of tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide, 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, are in the streets demanding fundamental change. How that demand is answered will decide everything that follows, because Scheidel's ledger names the alternatives, the forces he calls the Four Horsemen: mass-mobilization war, violent revolution, state collapse, and plague. In a nuclear century, letting the horsemen work it out is not something humanity survives.

History offers two ways out of this arrangement, and only one of them is a policy. This is the policy.

The proposal in one paragraph

America harvests, once, everything above $100 million, roughly $13 trillion in all: the law assesses every fortune on day one at election-day values, and the owners pay in shares rather than cash. The harvest capitalizes a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the public investment bank at the center of the Mission for America, which finances the ten-year rebuild of American energy, industry, housing, and infrastructure. Behind the harvest stands the permanent rule that keeps the country level afterward: you can get as rich as you want in your own lifetime, but you cannot found a dynasty. Nothing above $100 million passes to heirs, ever again. A parallel rule tells corporations sitting on idle cash piles: invest it in new products and productive capacity, or it is taxed. And as the money comes in, the taxes come off ordinary people: the harvest pays workers' Social Security and Medicare contributions for them, and the income tax comes off everyone below the top tenth.

We call it the American Jubilee, after the oldest economic idea on record: the periodic return of accumulated wealth to the community, so that no permanent caste of owners hardens over everyone else.⁷

The founding harvest

On the day the Jubilee is enacted, every American fortune is assessed at its election-day value, and everything above $100 million per person becomes an obligation to the nation. It can be settled two ways.

Settle now, in shares. Transfer the excess to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation at assessed value: stock, business interests, property, all in kind, so nobody faces a fire sale or a cash crunch. Title clears, the fortune's remaining $100 million is untouchable forever, and the family's affairs are settled.

Or let the meter run. The obligation that is not settled accrues statutory interest, set above the long-run return on capital, and is secured by a lien. It collects itself, with the accumulated interest, at the next transfer: death, gift, or expatriation. Waiting is legal, but by design it is a losing trade.

Most will settle early, because the arithmetic tells them to, and the harvest arrives not over a generation but in the first years. The structure is the twentieth century's most successful capital levy, translated. West Germany's Lastenausgleich of 1952, enacted by Adenauer's conservative government through ordinary democratic politics, assessed 50 percent of every large fortune at a fixed valuation date and collected it on a schedule, and the German economic miracle ran straight through the collection period.⁸ Japan's 1946–47 levy assessed up to 90 percent of the largest fortunes at once; the fastest sustained growth run any major economy had yet recorded followed.⁹ Belgium collected its postwar levy in corporate shares, the exact payment mechanism proposed here.¹⁰ No postwar capital levy produced an investment strike, and two preceded the greatest booms of the century.¹¹ And none of this was the work of revolutionaries. The wars created the emergency, but the levies themselves were laws, debated in parliaments and signed by conservative governments. Societies have chosen the leveling before, when they could see the alternative clearly enough.

Note what the harvest does not touch. It does not tax anyone's home, farm, business, or retirement account; 99.97 percent of Americans will never come within a hundred miles of the threshold. The 43,000 people it does touch remain, to the last one, among the richest people on earth, with $100 million each: more than 500 times the median family's wealth.¹²

The permanent rule

After the founding harvest, the Jubilee runs continuously, one lifetime at a time: an estate and gift tax of 100 percent on everything above $100 million per person.

The rule preserves exactly the thing wealth defenders say taxes destroy. The dynamism argument for great fortunes has always been about the builders, not the heirs. Nobody claims the third generation of a trust-fund family is out inventing things. A founder can still grow a company worth $50 billion and command it for life; what ends at the transfer is dynastic power over everyone else's economy and government. And be clear about what still passes on: your children inherit up to $100 million, which is, by any standard on earth, a fortune. What they do not inherit is the mega-fortune, the dynasty-scale kind that buys legislatures. Every mega-fortune gets one lifetime. And because the permanent rule stands behind the founding harvest, there is no rebuilding an aristocracy between harvests: the American oligarchy is dissolved once, and stays dissolved.

Why it is constitutional

The first question every reader will ask is whether the government can really do this. The answer is that nothing in the Constitution protects a fortune from the American people. Congress's taxing power has no ceiling on size: the United States has run a 94 percent income tax rate, a 77 percent estate tax rate, and 95 percent taxes on excess war profits,² and the Supreme Court held in Magnano (1934) that it does not strike down taxes for being too heavy.¹³ What the Constitution regulates is form. The government may not seize a named person's property; that is a taking requiring compensation, and a bill of attainder besides. It may take nearly anything from everyone in a class, through a duly enacted general tax of the right shape. The Constitution's rule, in other words, is about the paperwork, and the Jubilee's design work is about getting the paperwork right.

One clause supplies the fight. Article I requires "direct taxes" to be apportioned among the states by population, and a tax on simply holding wealth is the textbook direct tax. Apportionment is arithmetic nonsense for a wealth tax (poorer states would owe higher rates), so in practice the clause means a holding tax can be challenged. It is the same clause that killed the first peacetime income tax, in Pollock (1895); the country answered with the Sixteenth Amendment eighteen years later, and the Court's objection became a footnote.¹⁴ In Moore v. United States (2024), four justices signaled they would police that line aggressively again.¹⁵ The Jubilee is built to win anyway, on three layers.

The permanent rule is settled law. The Supreme Court held in Knowlton v. Moore (1900) that a tax on the transfer of wealth at death is an excise, not a direct tax, and 125 years of unbroken precedent confirm it,¹⁶ along with the gift tax (Bromley v. McCaughn, 1929) that stops deathbed giveaways.¹⁷ The United States ran a 77 percent top estate rate from 1941 to 1976, and no court ever struck a rate as too high; the Supreme Court has said flatly that it does not police the magnitude of a tax.¹³ One hundred percent above a threshold is a rate, and rates are Congress's to set.

The founding harvest is drafted as an accelerated transfer, not a holding tax. The taxable event is the transfer itself: settle-now is a real conveyance of assets to the RFC, taxed as the gift and estate tax have been taxed for a century; wait-and-owe is the same estate excise with its valuation date fixed and interest running, the Lastenausgleich structure, which assesses once and collects at transfer. The government's litigating position is strong, and it will still be attacked, so the statute says what happens if any piece falls: a severability clause keeps the rest of the law standing, and the statute falls back automatically to the plain permanent rule plus a mark-to-market income tax on the same taxpayers. The Jubilee can lose a battle without losing the war, and even its fallback position levels America within one generation.

The maximal backstop is the people themselves. If the courts try to wall off accumulated wealth from the democracy entirely, the response is the one the income tax used after Pollock: a constitutional amendment, which began as a radical movement demand, won ratification a generation later, and has served as the foundation of the modern American state ever since. A Jubilee Amendment, putting beyond dispute the people's power to level great fortunes, belongs in this program as the demand of last resort, on the table from day one.

Why the money cannot run

Every conversation about taxing great wealth ends with the same objection: they'll just leave. For this plan, they can't, and the reason is worth understanding precisely.

The assets are trapped even when the owners aren't. About 80 percent of the $13 trillion is US-listed stock, US private companies, and US real estate.¹⁸ Listed shares do not live in Monaco; they live in the US clearing system, at the Depository Trust Company in New York, and obey US law no matter where their owner sleeps.¹⁹ US real estate cannot be moved, and the US already taxes the American assets of foreigners (it has applied its estate tax to nonresident aliens' US holdings for a century).²⁰ A billionaire can change his address. His Apple shares, his company, and his buildings cannot change theirs.

The clock cannot be beaten. The predictable move is to give everything away in the window between a president's election and the law's enactment. That window is painted shut three ways. The harvest's valuation date is election day, set retroactively, which the Supreme Court blessed in United States v. Carlton (1994) and Congress does routinely.²¹ Existing law already pulls certain gifts made within three years of death back into the estate, and counts assets a person "gave away" while keeping control as never having left.²² And the new Congress is seated on January 3, two months after the election; the bill is on the floor before the first trust deed is dry.²³

The exit is a toll booth, not an escape hatch. The one true way out is renouncing citizenship, and US law already imposes an exit tax on renouncers (section 877A).²⁴ Under the Jubilee, expatriation is simply a transfer event: the obligation collects at the door, in full. Renouncing just schedules the harvest early. When Norway closed the loopholes in its exit tax in 2024, the wave of wealthy departures slowed markedly.²⁵

Hiding is a solved problem. Since FATCA, foreign banks report American clients' accounts to the IRS or forfeit access to the US financial system; over one hundred jurisdictions exchange account data automatically; Swiss banking secrecy for Americans died in a Justice Department program a decade ago.²⁶ What remains is enforcement funding and will, which the plan provides.

The corporate rule: invest it or lose it

Fortunes are not the only idle piles. American nonfinancial corporations sit on roughly $8.6 trillion in cash and liquid assets.²⁷ Berkshire Hathaway alone holds about $400 billion in cash and Treasury bills.²⁸ S&P 500 companies now spend over $1 trillion a year buying back their own stock,²⁹ which is the market's way of announcing that they can think of nothing better to build with the money.

The Jubilee's corporate rule is a revival. Since the 1920s, the tax code has contained an Accumulated Earnings Tax (section 531) that penalizes corporations for hoarding earnings "beyond the reasonable needs of the business." It has simply gone unenforced.³⁰ South Korea taxes large corporate earnings not directed to investment or wages under a law on its books right now.³¹ Taiwan has taxed undistributed corporate earnings since 1998 and lets companies escape the tax by filing and executing investment plans within three years.³²

The plan modernizes section 531 on that model: corporations holding liquid assets beyond their demonstrated operating needs either commit them to investment in new products, plants, and capacity under a filed plan, or the excess is taxed. Working capital is untouched; sixty years of case law under the existing statute already defines "reasonable needs" with a standard formula.³³ Dividends and buybacks do not count as investment; Korea tried counting dividends in 2015, watched the money leak straight out, and fixed the design in 2018.³⁴ The principle is Keynes's: money in an economy must be a stream, not a pond.³⁵ It applies to a corporate treasury exactly as it applies to a dynasty.

What the money builds

The harvest capitalizes the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RFC, the financing engine of the Mission for America, receives the settled assets in kind as its permanent capital base, in the first years rather than over a generation, and issues bonds against the interest-bearing obligations still outstanding, so its full financing capacity exists from day one. Capitalized with $13 trillion and leveraged conservatively, as every public development bank on earth leverages, the RFC supports on the order of $40 to 65 trillion in mission financing across the decade: the grid, the factories, the reactors, the housing, the water systems, all 21 missions, without one dollar of new taxes on anyone worth less than $100 million.³⁶ The center of the mission is productive industry, the means by which Americans make a living: energy, steel, vehicles, machinery, chips, ships, and the public infrastructure that carries them. This is not a spending program with a green label; it rebuilds the country's capacity to make the things its people need to live. After the founding harvest, the permanent rule keeps feeding the base: roughly $150 to 250 billion a year as new fortunes cross the line and pass at their builders' deaths.³⁷

This has been done before, and the example is precise. After World War II, Marshall Plan counterpart funds capitalized a new German public bank, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. That transfer, about 2 percent of GDP a year for four years, financed the German economic miracle and never stopped working: KfW is today a €545 billion institution still financing German industry 78 years later.³⁸ One transfer became a permanent national development bank. The Jubilee does for America what the Marshall Plan did for Germany, with America's own idle wealth, at roughly six times the relative scale.³⁸

The taxes come off ordinary people. Start with an honest accounting of who pays what. The bottom half of American taxpayers owes famously little federal income tax, about $63 billion a year all together.⁶ What that famous statistic hides is the tax those same households actually bleed: the payroll tax takes 7.65 percent of every paycheck from the first dollar, allows no deductions or exemptions, and the employer matches it again. Most American working households pay more in payroll tax than in income tax.⁴² So the Jubilee's relief starts where the burden actually is: the harvest's earnings pay workers' Social Security and Medicare contributions for them, which puts thousands of dollars a year back in a typical paycheck, and the same earnings make the trust funds whole dollar for dollar so that benefits are untouched. The income tax comes off as well, for the bottom 90 percent of earners, whose combined bill is about $600 billion a year.⁶ In 1939, only 3.9 million Americans paid federal income tax; it was a rich man's tax. World War II pushed it onto everyone, 43 million taxpayers by 1945, and it never came back off.³⁹ The Jubilee is the un-doing of 1943, and of the paycheck deduction that grew up beside it. The sequence is statutory, not discretionary: the taxes come off as the money comes in.

Americans will recognize the fairness logic, because they already live under it. Every homeowner in America pays about 1 percent of their home's value in property tax every single year, 2 percent in the highest-tax states, on the part the bank still owns, with no exemption and no debate. It is a wealth tax, roughly $800 billion a year of one, and it is one of the oldest and most settled taxes in the country.⁴⁰ The only Americans who pay no annual tax on their principal wealth are the ones whose wealth is not a house but a portfolio. The teacher pays on her $300,000 house every year; under the Jubilee, the billionaire finally pays once, and the teacher stops paying income tax and gets her payroll contribution paid besides.

What we say to the objections

"It's confiscation." It is a tax, of a kind America has levied since 1916,² at a threshold 500 times the median family's wealth,¹² paid in shares, with a settlement option that clears title in full. The country that ran a 77 percent estate tax for 35 years called it something else: normal.

"They'll stop building." The permanent rule touches no living fortune under $100 million and no living incentive above it; the founding harvest leaves every one of its 43,000 subjects with $100 million. Nobody builds a company for the purpose of enjoying its two-hundredth million posthumously. What ends is inherited economic aristocracy, which built nothing.

"The market will crash." Nothing is dumped. Shares transfer in kind to the RFC at assessed value; the RFC holds diversified assets, votes as a passive financial owner under statute, and rotates holdings gradually into mission investments on a published schedule. Corporate buybacks alone move more stock in a year than the harvest's rotation would.²⁹

"The government will waste it." The money does not enter the annual appropriations scramble. It capitalizes a bank, with published holdings, an independent board that no politician's family may sit on, statutory investment mandates, and a public ledger every citizen can read. Norway has run exactly this discipline over a $2 trillion fund for thirty years in full public view.⁴¹ And unlike an agency budget, a bank's investments return.

"The rich will leave." Read the section above again. Eighty percent of the money cannot leave, the valuation date sits behind them on election day, and the exit is a toll booth. The remaining question is enforcement staffing, which is a solvable problem the plan funds.

The demand

A hundred million dollars is enough. It is enough to be free forever, to fund any ambition, and to pass on security beyond any family's need for centuries. What lies above it is not comfort but power: power over markets, over media, over legislatures, and eventually over whether the republic's laws apply to its richest citizens at all. Every civilization before ours that let wealth concentrate to this point got its leveling anyway, from the four horsemen, at a price no one would choose.

America gets to choose: one harvest funds the rebuild, every mega-fortune after that lasts one lifetime, and the taxes come off the people. That is the American Jubilee, and it is how we pay for the Mission for America.