A bit of Kareem on a Sunday morning.

“Tax Day Shows the Gap”

Kareem Takes on the News

Summary by Kareem:

On Tax Day 2026, three prominent voices—Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and EU Tax Observatory founding director Gabriel Zucman—argue in The Guardian that America’s tax system systematically favors the ultra-wealthy at the expense of working people.

The authors cite research showing that in the 1960s, the 400 richest Americans paid roughly 50% of their income in taxes across all levels of government; today, that figure sits at approximately 24%. They also reference a global inequality report commissioned during South Africa’s G20 presidency, which found that between 2000 and 2024, “the richest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth, while the bottom half of humanity got just 1%.”

The piece points to a series of emerging policy responses: a G20 commitment in 2024 to more effectively tax ultra-high-net-worth individuals, a proposed 2% minimum wealth tax, legislative action in California, Washington state, and New York, and an international coalition led by Spain and Brazil. The authors frame these as “the first steps toward restoring a basic social principle: that those with the most should contribute their fair share.”

Kareem’s Take:

That massive drop from 50% down to 24% wasn’t some random accident or the universe just deciding to shake things up. It happened because the people with the most money and the most influence pushed for it, lawmakers signed off on it, and billionaires walked away with the prize money.

The guy working the counter at the post office didn’t engineer this. Most people have been way too busy trying to cover rent, groceries, and the nightmare of childcare costs to even notice the ground shifting beneath their feet. Meanwhile, sixty years of tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy have been stacking up like bricks in a wall, separating the winners from everyone else.

Justice Louis Brandeis warned us about this almost a hundred years ago. He said we can have democracy, or we can have extreme wealth concentrated in a few hands, but we can’t have both. We keep “rediscovering” that line like it’s some brand-new epiphany, yet here we are. Billionaires now hold about 16% of global GDP, which is wild when you realize it was only 3% back in the late ‘80s.

They use that mountain of cash to fund campaigns, bankroll think tanks, and hire armies of lobbyists to make sure the tax code stays exactly the way they like it. Look at the numbers: just 100 billionaire families dumped $2.6 billion into the 2024 elections. That’s nearly a fifth of all federal election spending coming from a tiny group of people. That isn’t a glitch in the system; that is the system.

And then we have to deal with that “self-made” billionaire myth, the idea of the lone genius who built an empire on nothing but grit and coffee. It’s a nice story, but it’s mostly fiction. It leaves out the roads, the court systems, the public universities, the internet, and the GPS, all the stuff paid for by taxpayers. Every major fortune in this country is built on a foundation the public funded. Yet, the people who benefited the most from those investments are often the ones screaming that taxation is “theft.” It’s a level of selective memory that would be embarrassing for most people, but apparently, the rules are different at the top.

If you look at the polls, most Americans, doesn’t matter if they’re Republicans or Democrats, actually agree that the wealthy should pay more. So why does reform always die before it gets anywhere? Because the wealthy fund the people who tell us reform is “impossible.” They fund the studies, the campaigns, and the lawyers who find the loopholes. When someone suggests a modest 2% wealth tax, it gets labeled “radical” or “unworkable,” and the media repeat it until it starts to sound like common sense.

Whenever you hear someone say a policy is “too complex” or “politically infeasible,” just know that’s code for “I don’t want the rules to change.” It’s worth remembering that income tax itself was called impossible right up until the day it became the law of the land.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure history gives us a reason to be purely optimistic. These changes usually take way longer than they should and cause a lot of unnecessary struggle along the way. But you can see some cracks in the wall. France’s wealth tax actually passed their elected chamber before the Senate blocked it. Washington state just approved a tax on million-dollar incomes. This weekend, a group of countries is meeting in Barcelona to try and push this forward. The math is actually pretty simple: a 2% tax on billionaires could raise $250 billion a year from just 3,000 people.

The math works. It’s the political guts that are missing.

Asking for a “fair share” isn’t some crazy, radical slogan. It’s a description of a tax system this country actually used to have, one we let them tear down piece by piece over the last sixty years. The real question is whether we’re going to bother rebuilding it, or if we’re just going to keep acting surprised every time a popular reform quietly gets killed behind closed doors.