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

The stakes

Humanity has run this experiment before, and the results are on file. Across all of recorded history, the historian Walter Scheidel found, extreme concentrations of wealth have been leveled by exactly four things: mass-mobilization war, violent revolution, state collapse, and plague. Never, at scale, by peaceful choice.¹ The one great leveling in living memory, the mid-century compression that built the middle classes of America, Europe, and Japan, was the fiscal aftermath of two world wars: governments imposed capital levies of up to 90 percent and confiscatory war-profit taxes, and the largest fortunes on earth fell more than 90 percent between 1914 and 1945.² The nearest exceptions are the ones that light the path: West Germany's conservative government enacted a 50 percent capital levy by ordinary democratic vote in 1952,³⁹ and Korea and Taiwan dissolved their landed aristocracies by law, choosing reform ahead of the revolution they could see coming.⁴⁰ Societies have chosen the leveling before, but none has yet chosen it at world scale, in time.

Since 1980, the concentration has rebuilt itself toward the levels of 1914, the eve of the catastrophe that last leveled it.³ About 117,000 people now hold fortunes above $100 million.⁴ Their combined wealth is roughly $43 trillion, of which about $32 trillion sits above the $100 million line,⁵ and 3,428 billionaires account for $20 trillion of it by themselves.⁶ One stadium's worth of people holds three times the wealth of the poorest four billion humans,⁷ while the planet they share overheats for want of investment that their idle fortunes could fund several times over.

And a detonator is now wired to the concentration: 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 117,000 balance sheets. A moment is coming when billions of people are in the streets demanding fundamental change. How the world answers that demand will decide whether humanity continues at all, because the last time the horsemen did the leveling, the weapons ran out at Hiroshima, and this time they would not. If we let the horsemen work it out, humanity does not survive the resolution.

History says this ends one of two ways. Either the world's nations agree, for the first time ever, to level by design, or the four horsemen eventually do it the old way. The world can have a third world war, or its richest people can agree to be centimillionaires. This plan is the second option, worked out in full.

The proposal in one paragraph

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 and assets rather than cash, followed by a permanent rule that no one passes more than $100 million to heirs. A parallel rule requires corporations sitting on idle cash mountains to invest them in real production or forfeit the excess. The proceeds, on the order of $30 trillion,⁵ capitalize the greatest building program in human history: a mega Marshall Plan that finances clean energy, modern agriculture, clean water, transportation, clean steel and shipping and aviation, and nuclear power, everywhere, through national governments and a rebuilt system of national, regional, and international development banks. Ordinary people's taxes fall as the harvest flows. Nobody on earth loses anything but the part of a fortune beyond any human use.

Every mega-fortune gets one lifetime, and $100 million passed to your heirs is still, by any standard on earth, a fortune. And every country gets the tools to build. That is the Global Jubilee.

The arithmetic of the harvest

The one-time harvest yields approximately $32 trillion on paper (conservatively $20 to 26 trillion after honest allowance for the gap between paper valuations and realizable value, which paying in shares largely closes).⁸ For scale: that is roughly 27 percent of one year's world GDP,⁹ six times the annual revenue of the US federal government,¹⁰ and nearly a year of every government on earth's combined revenue,¹¹ taken once, from 0.002 percent of the world's adults. Afterward, the permanent rule keeps yielding $1 to 1.5 trillion a year as new fortunes cross the line and old ones pass at death,¹² which is five to seven times what the boldest proposal currently in international circulation (the 2 percent billionaire minimum tax) would raise.¹³

The geography matters. The United States holds about $13 trillion of the prize, roughly 40 percent. The US, China, and Europe together hold about two-thirds.¹⁴ A compact of the G7 plus China covers most of the world's excess wealth, which means this is a negotiation among perhaps a dozen capitals, not 195.

How nations coordinate without a world government

The standard objection to any global tax is that there is no global taxman. The answer is that the world already runs a coordinated global tax without one. The OECD's global minimum corporate tax operates today in more than 50 countries, agreed by about 140, with no treaty and no world government: each country passed a domestic law with a shared trick called the top-up. If any company's profits go undertaxed in one country, other participating countries tax the difference themselves. Undercutting the minimum stopped paying, so havens folded.¹⁵

The Jubilee copies that architecture, applied to people. Each participating country harvests its own residents under its own law and constitution, however its legal system does it best. And each adopts the top-up: if a centimillionaire's home country refuses to harvest him, every participating country gains the right to collect against his assets, his companies, and his market access within their borders. Escape then requires abandoning not one country but every major economy at once, which for people whose wealth is woven into global markets is another way of saying the fortune stays whether the owner goes or not.

The enforcement rails exist too. Over 110 jurisdictions already exchange bank-account information automatically; more than 100 million accounts are reported every year.¹⁶ The United States proved with FATCA that a 30 percent withholding threat bends the entire global banking system in a single decade.¹⁷ Beneficial-ownership registries, crypto-asset reporting, and exit taxes are live law across the major economies. Norway tightened its exit tax in 2024 and the exodus of its wealthiest slowed markedly, from over 250 departures a year at the peak to a small fraction of that.¹⁸ And each participating legislature writes its valuation date behind it, to the day the compact was announced, a practice courts have long allowed,¹⁹ so the window between announcement and enactment, in which fortunes might flee, never opens. What the world wars accomplished with capital controls and confiscation, the compact accomplishes with plumbing that is already installed.

The natural institutional home for the compact is the UN framework convention on international tax cooperation, launched by a vote of 125 nations and negotiating right now, with the taxation of the ultra-wealthy explicitly on its agenda.²⁰ The Global South built that venue, and this plan gives it something worthy of it.

The building program: a Marshall Plan for everybody

Thirty trillion dollars is not for dividing: split among eight billion people it comes to a one-time $4,000 and gone. Put to work, it is the capital base of a new world economy. The plan's answer to "where does the money go" is the same answer for a fortune as for a corporate cash pile: into building.

And building means, first of all, productive industry: the means of making a living. This is not aid as the world has known it, organized around a checklist of development goals. Poor countries are poor because they lack the means to make a living, not because they lack needs, and every country that ever got rich did it the same way: by building the industries that make the stuff of modern life. The core of the Jubilee is capital for every country to do exactly that: steel, energy, vehicles, machinery, agriculture, transportation, whatever each country needs to make its own living. The public goods, the clean water and the grids and the schools, ride on that industrial core, the way they always have in every country that built them.

The machine already exists. The world runs about 530 public development banks with $23 trillion in assets, financing a tenth of all investment on earth.²¹ China Development Bank alone, with $2.6 trillion in assets and a loan book several times the World Bank's, proves a single institution can deploy at trillion scale.²² What the system lacks is not competence but capital, and every serious reform proposal of the last decade says so: the Bridgetown Initiative, the G20's Triple Agenda report calling for a tripling of development-bank lending, the Sevilla Commitment of 2025 in which the world's governments called for a tripling of multilateral lending capacity while naming a $4 trillion annual development financing gap and identifying no source for it.²³ The Jubilee is the missing funding source for the reform agenda the world has already written. We adopt those proposals by name, with credit, and fund them.

The precedent is exact. After World War II, Marshall Plan counterpart funds capitalized a new German public bank, KfW. That one-time transfer still finances German industry 78 years later as a €545 billion institution.²⁴ One transfer became a permanent development bank and helped power the German economic miracle. The Jubilee repeats the maneuver on every continent at once: harvest proceeds endow national mission funds and development banks; the proceeds recapitalize existing ones and charter new ones, including new regional and international banks owned by the countries they serve.

Pace is set by what economies can absorb. No economy can absorb unlimited investment; the development literature puts the ceiling around 15 to 25 percent of a recipient's GDP per year, and pushing past institutional capacity produces waste and graft.²⁵ So the plan endows the stock and deploys the flow: holdings rotate gradually out of passive claims on existing companies and into new productive assets, and worldwide deployment of an additional $2 to 3 trillion a year amounts to a 7 to 11 percent lift to global investment, which happens to be roughly the officially estimated gap for climate and development.²⁶ The constraint that matters is engineers, factories, grids, and trained workers, and part of the money's job is to manufacture its own absorption capacity: the plan finances the solar factories, the cement plants, the engineering schools, and the ministries' project pipelines that raise the ceiling year by year. The United States went from 2 percent to 40 percent of GDP on war production in four years when it decided to;²⁷ building capacity is a decision.

The endowment math. Does deploying at that ceiling eat the principal? Mostly no, and where it does, on purpose. The arithmetic: a $30 trillion endowment earning ordinary long-run returns throws off roughly $1.2 to 1.5 trillion a year, and the permanent rule adds another $1 to 1.5 trillion a year of new harvest,¹² so the system generates $2.5 to 3 trillion a year forever without touching a dollar of principal, which is right at the absorption ceiling. And the deployed money divides into three kinds. Most of it is investment in productive industry and revenue-earning infrastructure, the steel mills and power plants and transit systems; that money is not spent at all. It changes form, from shares of existing companies into ownership of new ones, and comes back with returns. Some of it is infrastructure that recovers only part of its cost, water systems and grids extended to people who can pay little; that recycles partly. And some of it is pure public goods, the sanitation and the clinics and the universal clean water that will never send back a dividend, and that is real spending. Here the plan is unapologetic: the funds are allowed to spend principal down for foundational public goods, on published schedules, because a water system that keeps a country's children alive is worth more than the shares that were traded for it. The discipline is "never leak," not "never spend": principal may become real assets and legislated public goods, but it may never dribble into the recurring budgets of whoever holds office this year. Even so, the arithmetic says the drawdown stays small. Delivering safe water, sanitation, and hygiene to every human being on earth is costed at roughly $114 billion a year,⁴⁷ under a twentieth of the flow the endowment generates without shrinking.

Governance: sovereignty preserved, trust verified

A global fund run from one capital turns into an empire, while one that requires unanimity never moves at all. The plan's governance is stitched from three mechanisms that each already work somewhere.

A global board on the two-bloc model. The Global Fund for health has moved $70 billion cleanly through some of the hardest governance environments on earth using a board split between contributor and recipient blocs, where major decisions need supermajorities of both and no single country holds a veto.²⁸ The Jubilee's global board, structured the same way, sets only three things: the harvest standard, the allocation formula, and the certification rules. It runs no projects.

Regional councils on the Marshall Plan model. The genius of the Marshall Plan was that America set the envelope but Europeans divided it themselves, negotiating allocations among themselves in a council that later became the OECD.²⁹ The Jubilee does the same: regional councils of recipient nations divide their region's envelope, so no one in Washington or Brussels decides what Ghana builds.

Delivery through national institutions under national law. Money lands in each country's own mission funds and development banks, co-managed EU-style with the national government. Where a country's laws restrict receiving international money directly (the myth that Mexico's constitution forbids it dissolves on inspection, but its electoral law does wall off political entities, and every country has its own quirks), the national development bank is the universal receiving vehicle: Mexico's NAFIN, for instance, is already accredited to receive global climate funds directly.³⁰

Trust is certified, universally. Money flows to governments in proportion to verified capacity to spend it honestly, and the verification applies to everyone. The model is the Millennium Challenge Corporation's scorecard: it grades countries on twenty independent third-party indicators, sets hard hurdles, suspends funding on coups, and has a documented record of countries reforming specifically to qualify.³¹ The Jubilee's certification differs in one essential way: it is universal. Every country, including the United States, is graded by the same independent process. (The US has failed such tests before, withdrawing from the extractive-industries transparency initiative in 2017;³² mutuality is what makes certification an honor roll rather than an insult.) Where a government fails certification, the money routes around it, not away from its people: through UN and NGO channels, through development-bank project finance, directly to provinces and cities, the way the Global Fund already operates in states it cannot trust.³³ And every fund in the system publishes every holding and every transaction, machine-readable, as a condition of receiving a single dollar; no head of government or their family may sit on any fund board. Norway has published every holding of a $2 trillion public fund for nearly three decades;³⁴ sunlight at that standard is a solved problem.

The split: who gets what

Half of each country's harvest stays home, funding its own missions and its own people's tax relief. Half is dedicated to the world, through the system above; the allocation formula weights each country's share by need and certified capacity, and caps it at what its economy can absorb.

Dedicated does not mean airlifted, so here is the math. The principal is not shipped anywhere: the American half, roughly $6.5 trillion, remains an endowment, still invested, much of it in the same American assets it arrived as. What crosses borders is the flow that endowment finances: an ordinary 3 to 3.5 percent draw comes to about $200 to 230 billion a year of project investment, roughly two-thirds of a percent of US GDP and about half the Marshall Plan's intensity.³⁵ That flow finances the industrialization of everybody else: the largest market-creation program in history, in which American factories will sell. And over the decades, as the projects are built, the endowment's own holdings migrate with the flow: it holds fewer shares of the old economy and more stakes in Nigerian steel mills and Indonesian grids, until the fund literally owns pieces of the world it built.

Rich-country publics get their share as visible relief from the taxes they actually feel. In the United States that is above all the payroll tax, which most working households pay more of than income tax: the fund pays workers' Social Security and Medicare contributions for them, visible on every paystub, and makes the trust funds whole.⁴⁸ A modest European tranche buys five-point VAT cuts in Germany, France, and Britain simultaneously.³⁷

In poorer countries, where ordinary people pay little formal income tax to cut, the dividend arrives as the thing itself: the fund delivers the grid connection, the clean water, the transit line, and puts a date on each. And everywhere, citizens hold registered ownership shares in their national fund and receive its annual statement. The Jubilee deliberately pays no universal cash dividend: handing out money without building the supply of things to buy just raises prices, and a poor family with an extra hundred dollars in a village without power or water is still poor. The dividend is the power bill falling to zero because the fund built the plant: citizens own the fund, and the fund delivers services instead of mailing checks.

Why the world economy comes through fine

Everything in this plan has been done before, piecemeal, and the economies that did it are the success stories of the twentieth century.

Japan's 1946–47 capital levy took up to 90 percent of its largest fortunes; the fastest sustained growth the world had yet seen followed.³⁸ West Germany's conservative government levied 50 percent of assets in 1952 and boomed straight through it.³⁹ Japan, Korea, and Taiwan broke up their landed wealth wholesale and became the East Asian miracle, while the Philippines, which spared its oligarchy, stagnated: the cleanest natural experiment development economics owns says redistribution was the precondition of prosperity, not its enemy.⁴⁰ Belgium let its postwar levies be paid in corporate shares, the exact in-kind mechanism proposed here.⁴¹ No postwar capital levy anywhere produced an investment strike.⁴²

The mechanics protect the markets. Nothing is dumped: assets transfer in kind and rotate gradually. Demand does not fall: the ultra-rich consume a vanishing share of what they take in (the wealthiest households spend about six cents of a marginal dollar, against nearly fifty cents at the bottom),⁴³ while the development banks receiving it invest all of it, so the transfer raises world investment nearly dollar for dollar. Modern macroeconomics calls the problem "the saving glut of the rich": tens of trillions parked in claims on existing assets, chasing yield and inflating bubbles instead of funding anything new.⁴⁴ The Jubilee drains that glut into the world's actual to-do list.

What we say to the objections

"The US will never join." Today, no. This is a vision plan, and visions recruit. But the design does not need unanimity to begin: the top-up rule means a coalition of willing major economies can harvest their own residents and collect against holdouts' assets within their borders, exactly as the corporate minimum tax began. Coalitions that control market access set world rules; FATCA proved one country alone could.

"Valuing 117,000 fortunes is impossible." Switzerland values every resident's worldwide assets, including private businesses, every single year, as a routine administrative matter, and has for a century.⁴⁵ The top of the distribution is mostly listed equity and registered property, the easiest assets on earth to value, and payment in shares makes valuation self-enforcing: undervalue the company and you have given the fund a bargain.

"It's the end of ambition." Every incentive that ever built a company survives intact for a lifetime, and heirs still inherit up to $100 million each, a genuine fortune by any measure. What ends is inherited oligarchy: the third-generation heir with a mega-fortune he did not build and a government he can buy. The Jubilee is arguably the most pro-dynamism wealth policy ever proposed; it clears the board every generation so that new builders compete against each other instead of against compound interest.

"It's utopian." The utopian position is that this level of concentration can persist indefinitely and nothing will happen. That position has no historical examples. Scheidel's ledger is unambiguous: every society that reached this point got its leveling, and got it from the horsemen.¹ The Jubilee is the only version of the inevitable that anyone would choose.

The choice

Between 1914 and 1945 the world's great fortunes were leveled anyway, by war, hyperinflation, revolution, and collapse, at the cost of a hundred million lives.⁴⁶ Out of that wreckage came the most broadly shared prosperity humanity has known. It is the worst imaginable way to have gotten it, and the only way anyone has ever gotten it.

The Global Jubilee is the offer to do it the other way, once, on purpose: anyone can hold one hundred million dollars, every mega-fortune gets one lifetime, and idle money goes to work building a world that does not cook. The alternative is not the status quo, which is not stable; it is the horsemen, on their schedule instead of ours.

Be a centimillionaire. Help build the world. It is the best deal the rich have ever been offered, and history suggests it expires.