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We say they have too much money, and that it should be spent on better things. We say “pay their fair share,” without explaining what that means. To make the moral case for taxing the rich, we have to rethink how the rich get rich and what the accumulation of wealth does to our economy. Then we can make the case for seriously taxing the rich and preventing the mass accumulation of wealth in the first place.

In March, Washington State passed a “Millionaire’s Tax.” In California, a one-time “Billionaire Tax” initiative will be on the ballot in November. And Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. Most Americans tell pollsters that they support the idea of “taxing the rich,” but taking back a tiny bit more of what the excessively wealthy have extracted from us is not good enough. We need to make the case that there was something morally wrong with their accumulating that much wealth in the first place. We need to change how our economy operates such that no-one is ever again able to amass enough wealth to warp entire markets and corrupt our political system.

Feel free to skip the following “Critique of Current Messaging” and jump ahead to “Reframing the Debate” and “What to Say” below!

The current messaging around why we should tax the rich falls into roughly three types: “because they have it,” “because we need it,” and “they should pay their fair share.”

From the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy press release, Historic Millionaires’ Tax in Washington Will Make State’s Tax Code Fairer, Raise Critical Revenue:

Today Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed into law the state’s new millionaires’ tax, propelling the Evergreen State forward toward a fairer economy with a tax code more based on the ability to pay.

From Billionaire Tax Now, the organization behind the California Billionaire Tax Act initiative:

The wealth of U.S. and California billionaires has grown enormously over the past decades — much faster than overall economic growth. In 1982, the wealth of the top .0002% Americans was about 2% of the country’s GDP (gross domestic product). In 2025, it has increased to 20% of GDP. From 1982 to 2025 the annual growth of billionaire’s wealth has been 7.5% per year, five times the growth of average incomes over the same period (1.5% per year).

With the attention given to the skyrocketing accumulation of wealth and the enormous tax breaks for the wealthy in the Trump budget, this argument has plenty of support, but it does not challenge the long-standing myth that the wealth of the rich is earned and well-deserved.

Also from Billionaire Tax Now:

Stop the California Healthcare Collapse & Protect Education and Food Assistance. We’re calling on California’s billionaires to pay a one-time, 5% emergency billionaire tax to prevent the collapse of California healthcare and ensure our state’s families can get the care we need. The billionaire tax is a commonsense1 solution to a looming crisis and will help our state build a strong middle class.

The messaging around this state initiative seems to suggest that billionaires could be the heroes that “save” California’s health care system, because “we need the money more than they do.” This messaging sounds like it was designed by consultants who were tasked with not hurting billionaires’ feelings. The “yacht” graphic above is as hard-hitting as this campaign gets, and even that was the only one of its kind.

This “the money could be used for better things” argument is being used a lot right now in reference to tax cuts for the rich and also to draw comparisons between Trump’s crippling program cuts and his more lavish personal spending and gratuitous pocket-lining.

From It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires by Gabriel Zucman in The New York Times:

Why do the world’s most fortunate people pay among the least in taxes, relative to the amount of money they make? The simple answer is that while most of us live off our salaries, tycoons like Jeff Bezos live off their wealth…
The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea. What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else.

This well constructed piece with great infographics defines, “not paying their fair share” as paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than the non-wealthy. The “buy, borrow, die,” explanation, that they essentially live by borrowing against “unrealized” earnings, makes sense and is growing better understood. But this argument also fails to challenge the idea that it’s perfectly fine that they amassed such disproportionate wealth in the first place, so long as they don’t get any special treatment when it comes to paying their taxes on it.

From the Research Collaborative based on the “Race, Class Narrative” model:

No matter our background, faith or color, most of us would move heaven and earth for our families. But as our work has made America prosper, a greedy few have rigged the rules to redirect resources from our communities to their country clubs, from our classrooms to their ballrooms, and from our public parks to their private jets. They keep us strapped, stressed, and separated so we won’t join together to demand the programs, schools and supports our families need. Together, we can make billionaires pay what they owe in wages and taxes, and make our leaders spend public money for public good.2

This messaging suggests moral judgment with the terms “greedy,” “rigged the rules,” and “pay what they owe,” especially with the addition of “in wages.” I particularly like the framing about “public money for public good.” This is headed down the right path, but we need to support messaging like this with better explanatory narratives about how our entire economy works.

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This is where we challenge the myth that the rich get rich because they are “better than” other people, not just smarter or more creative or hard working, but somehow more virtuous, more morally deserving. If you actually create something that makes everyone’s lives better? Great. Be a multi-millionaire. Buy a big house and a fancy car. But mostly, being a billionaire or trillionaire means you either inherited it or took advantage of a whole heck of a lot of people along the way!

NOTE: Instead of trying to debunk myths like “we need to give tax cuts to the rich because they are the ones who create the jobs,” we need to bypass, which means skip the debunking and go straight to talking about what is true, which is that “the mega-rich get rich by cutting jobs” and other bad behavior.

“Taxing the rich” is morally right for three reasons:
1. They owe it to us. We invested in their success. They need to pay us back.
2. They obtained their excessive wealth through immoral means: exploitation and corruption.
3. Accumulation of wealth is bad for job growth, economic stability, and democracy.

How do the excessively rich get that way?

By taking advantage of public investment.

First of all, government is us. It’s the tool we use to make and carry out group decisions, to take care of each other and improve our quality of life. We invest in each other and in our common future by providing resources that are supposed to benefit everybody, like our infrastructure, education, scientific research, and technological advancements like the Internet and GPS, without which companies like Amazon and Google would not even exist.

Through exploitation. The mega-rich extract more than their fair share of the wealth created by investors, workers, suppliers, taxpayers and consumers. They use monopoly power and collusion to crush competition, raise prices and suppress wages. They engage in massive scale wage theft. They strip assets from companies and dump their pension obligations.

Through corruption. They use the power of concentrated wealth to influence our government, to gain lucrative government contracts and subsidies, to externalize environmental and health costs, to externalize risks and get bailed out, to acquire tax breaks and to get away with tax evasion, ALL OF WHICH WE PAY FOR.

Why is excessive wealth accumulation bad for the economy?When we allow wealth to accumulate at the top, it encourages the incredibly risky speculative investment behavior that causes economic crashes. It funds the replacement of workers with outsourcing, robotics and now A.I. It funds buyouts and mergers that increase monopoly power. And it increases corruption: the influence of concentrated wealth on our political system.

Our economy is the means to an end: the well-being of people. When it fails to serve our needs, we have every right to change it. When you think of it from this perspective it would be morally wrong NOT to tax the rich.

“Why tax the wealthy? Because they owe it to us. We invested in their success, as taxpayers, workers and consumers. They got their excessive wealth by taking more than their fair share at every step of the way and buying their way our of being held responsible. Besides, hoarding wealth is bad for job growth, economic stability, and democracy.”

“Generations of Americans invested in things like interstate highways, the Internet, GPS, and medical research, without which huge corporations like Amazon and Google could not exist! They owe us dividends on our investments!”

“Mega-corporations use monopoly power and illegal collusion to suppress wages, raise prices and squeeze out small businesses.”

“The mega-rich make their money by cutting jobs, not creating them. That’s why Wall Street celebrates when unemployment goes up.”

“Too much hoarded wealth at the top has changed our economy. We used to be about producing real things. Now it’s all speculation, creating bubbles that make people trillionaires on paper, then crash the whole economy, hurting people but allowing big corporations to swallow up small businesses (like family farms) at fire-sale prices.”

“Hoarding massive amounts of wealth has made it possible for the mega-rich to corrupt our government, to get subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts, as well as get-out-of-jail-free cards from the laws that apply to everyone else.”

“It’s not enough to tax the mega-wealthy at the same rate as workers. Taxes on hoarded wealth should be high enough to discourage them from taking advantage of people and corrupting our government.”

“It takes millions of people to create wealth. We used to make sure that everyone got their fair share. Now investors take it all. We need to use our government to make the system fair again. Taxing hoarded wealth is a great place to start.”

Thank you so much for reading this. I hope it is of use to you in your work and activism!

In solidarity, always,

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The Moral Case for Taxing the Rich

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