MEDIAWATCH – Chloe is right – tax the mega wealthy
Chlöe Swarbrick on Green Party’s economic plans: Is it finally time to tax the rich?
“If we were advocating or fighting for free compulsory education or free hospitals these days, we’d be called ‘wasteful spending’. We’d be called Marxists and all the rest …
“The reality is that we’ve done really big things in the past. In the 1930s and 40s, after world wars, the Great Depression, we came together as a country and decided to build a nation, which looked at the foundations of public healthcare, public education and public housing.
“Right now, we’re in a situation where the top 1% in this country hold 23% of all of the country’s wealth, and IRD research from 2023 told us that the top 311 households pay an effective tax rate less than half that of the average New Zealander. It’s not fair.”
Nobel Prize-winning economists have recently called for a global tax on the ultra-rich, arguing that even a modest 2% wealth tax on billionaires could raise substantial revenue internationally.
Le Monde reported that, relative to their pay, billionaires from Bernard Arnault to Elon Musk have lower tax rates than the average taxpayer. Meanwhile, an OECD report has argued that wealth taxes could disincentivise entrepreneurship, harming innovation and long-term growth.
The Green Party proposes a wealth tax that would affect the top 3% in this country. Anyone with an individual net worth of more than $2 million (or $4m for a couple), minus mortgages or debt, would pay a 2.5% tax above that $2m net worth.
“Look, I’m not gonna pretend that it is easy to change the tax system,” Swarbrick said. “Of course it’s not. But ease should not be the reason that we do something.
“Fairness, equity, and the fundamental principles and values that we have as New Zealanders. That is that we care about each other and the planet that we live on should be the driving force behind why we do things.
“Some of the hardest-working New Zealanders that I have met are single mothers working multiple jobs, paying double the effective tax rate of the multi, multi-millionaires and billionaires in this country. Any politician who wants to claim to be fighting for hard-working New Zealanders should be fighting for those who make their income from work, not from wealth accumulation.”
Chloe is 100% right – tax the mega wealthy!
Billionaires’ wealth surged $6.5tn over past decade, Oxfam reports
The wealth of the world’s 3,000 billionaires has surged by $6.5tn (£4.8tn) in real terms over the past decade, according to Oxfam, equivalent to 14.6% of global output.
In total the richest 1% of the global population has gained at least $33.9tn in real terms, which the charity said was “enough to end annual global poverty 22 times over”.
The figures come as various governments face growing calls to introduce a wealth taxon the international elite.
Let’s have a new deal on the Billionaire Class….
….or this too…
Who is brave enough to back Brazil’s global tax on billionaires? The answer will define our future
The response to the pandemic was one test of that proposition. Now the world’s governments face another. Last week, Brazilian climate minister Ana Toni explained a proposal put forward by her government (and now supported by South Africa, Germany and Spain), for a 2% global tax on the wealth of the world’s billionaires. Though it would affect just 3,000 of the super-rich, it would raise around $250bn(£195bn): a significant contribution either to global climate funds or to poverty alleviation.
Radical? Not at all. According to calculations by Oxfam, the wealth of billionaires has been growing so fast in recent years that maintaining it at a constant level would have required an annual tax of 12.8%. Trillions, in other words: enough to address global problems long written off as intractable.
You would need to perform Olympian mental gymnastics to oppose Brazil’s very modest proposal. It addresses, albeit to a tiny extent, one of the great democratic deficits of our time: that capital operates globally, while voting power stops at the national border. Without global measures, in the contest between people and plutocrats, the plutocrats will inevitably win. They can extract vast wealth from the nations in which they operate, often with the help of government subsidies and state contracts, and shift it through opaque networks of shell companies and secrecy regimes, placing it beyond the reach of any tax authority. This is what some of the global “investors” in the UK’s water companies have done. The money they extracted is now gone, and we are left with both the debts they accumulated and the ruins of the system they ransacked. Get tough with capital, or capital will get tough with you.
The Brazilian proposal, which will be put before the G20 summit in Rio in November, has already been dismissed by the US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, who suggested there was no need for it. On whose behalf does she make this claim? Not ours. Wherever people have been surveyed, including in the US, there is strong support for raising taxes on the rich.
In the two years following the start of the pandemic, the world’s richest 1% captured 63% of economic growth. The collective fortune of billionaires rose by $2.7bn a day, while some of the world’s poorest became poorer still. Between 2020 and 2023, the five richest men on Earth doubled their wealth.
Billionaire wealth impoverishes us all: astonishingly, each of them produces, on average, a million times more carbon dioxide than the average global citizen in the bottom 90%. Billionaires are a blight on the planet.
Yet, because they are the true citizens of nowhere, shifting their wealth and residence between jurisdictions, they pay far lower levels of tax than the most downtrodden of their workers. Oxfam has calculated, using records unearthed by the investigative journalists ProPublica in 2021, that Elon Musk pays a “true tax rate” of 3.27%, and Jeff Bezos less than 1%. Falling tax rates and the clever workarounds designed by the lawyers and accountants serving the ultra-rich help to explain the growth of their fortunes.
Wealth that could otherwise support public services and public wellbeing is siphoned out of nation states. As the global rich accumulate ever greater economic power, and find ever more inventive ways to evade democratic restraint, they become more potent than many governments. There’s a word for this: oligarchy. Some of them use this power to demolish democratic safeguards. To give one example, they have lobbied successfully to pull down the rules and caps on campaign finance, until, in some nations, they appear to wield more influence over elections than the electorate.
…if we want to build the social and physical infrastructure we need to radically adapt to the realities of catastrophic climate change, we need to tax the rich!
I’m not looking for socialism here folks, just basic garden variety regulated capitalism!
There are 14 Billionaires in NZ + 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals, let’s start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry.
You should be angry, NZ Capitalism is a rigged trick for the rich and powerful. The real demarcation line of power in a western democracy is the 1% + their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us!
Do not allow their smears of ‘Envy’ dilute the righteous rage you should all be feeling!
There’s no point making workers pay more to rebuild our resilience, tax the rich!
-Sugar Tax
-Inheritance Tax
-Wealth Tax
-Financial Transactions Tax
-New top tax rate on people earning over $300 000 per year.
-Capital Gains Tax
-Windfall profit taxes
-First $10 000 tax free
Neoliberalism is a failure for the people and a win for the mega wealthy.
Lift the tax yoke from the workers and the people and place it on the mega wealthy and have them pay their fair share for once!
In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
In 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.
And now in 2025, the real-terms gains of $33.9tn for the world’s richest 1% is ‘enough to end annual global poverty 22 times over.
This isn’t democracy, this is a feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
We are but meat bags secreting hormones addicted to dopamine rewards for fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism uber allas where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves to make sense of a world around us that is frightening and in constant entropy.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
There is a point when you will rise against this because a burning planet will force you to stand.
We need to be kinder to individuals and far crueller to corporations.
Chloe is 100% right – tax the mega wealthy!
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