From Newsgroup: aus.politics

*How the explosion of the ultra-wealthy risks democracy*

/By business reporter Gareth Hutchens, ABC News, Australia/
/ Wed 17 Jun 2026 at 6:20am/

<https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-17/democracy-cannot-survive-trillionaires-gabriel-zucman-elon-musk/106798842?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20260616_newsam_newsletter&utm_id=6a31c06ac137f41055de9bf78b76411e>


*Topic:Income Distribution*

"Gabriel Zucman says there cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us."

*Can democracy survive the existence of trillionaires?*

"French economist Gabriel Zucman, one of the world's foremost experts on wealth taxation, raised that question last week.

He said anyone celebrating Elon Musk's US$1 trillion fortune needed to understand the fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy.
"The explosion of billionaire wealth has been one of the defining
features of our time," he wrote.

"It is impossible to understand today's world if one ignores this upheaval. "For with the explosion of the wealth of the super-rich has come an
explosion of their power. The power to tilt markets, to shape public discourse, to influence policymaking, to stall social progress."

In a series of tweets, he explained how the world had seen nothing like
what it was seeing today.

He said that at the peak of the Gilded Age in the United States in the
late 19th century, the four wealthiest families in the US could have
bought 4 per cent of all of the goods and services produced in the US in
a single year.

"This is a Senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists, and for the monopolists!" (Source: 'The Bosses of the Senate', by Joseph Keppler
(1889), wikicommons)

But today, he said, that same tiny fraction of the US population, the
top 0.00001 per cent (which now includes 19 households), could buy 14
per cent of everything produced in the US in a single year.
He published the graph below to show what that looks like.
A graph depicts the rise in wealth for the richest Americans.

"The concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent in the US has
become extreme. (Source: Gabriel Zucman)"

We have to understand what this level of extreme wealth can buy, he said. "That's how Musk could buy Twitter on a whim for US$44 billion in 2022.
That's how [Larry] Ellison can buy TikTok, CBS, and CNN today. That's
how billionaires could account for 20 per cent of all political
donations in the 2024 election cycle," he said.

"As the AI boom is minting billionaires by the day and the first
trillionaires are now coming into view, one thing is becoming clearer
and clearer.

"The battle between democracy and oligarchy will be the defining battle
of the 21st century," he said.

*The mind-boggling number*

"The human brain can't comprehend how large $1 trillion is. The Verge
tried to explain it this way:

"If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a
half days," it wrote.
"A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years.
"But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years rCo to reach that point
today, you would have needed to start counting around the time that Neanderthals went extinct."

Zucman said after World War II it had looked, for a time, as though
extreme wealth belonged to the past, but it was now "coming back in full force".
In the 1980s, billionaires used to own wealth equivalent to 3 per cent
of the world's gross domestic product (GDP). Today, it's 17 per cent.

"And the upsurge is accelerating," he said.
A graph shows a rise in wealth.

The world's wealthiest people are becoming comparatively wealthier.
(Source: Gabriel Zucman)

In the 1980s, the 0.001 per cent wealthiest families living in the UK
(roughly 200 families) owned wealth equivalent to 5 per cent of UK GDP.
Today, it's 20 per cent.

"In the 1980s, when this movement started, poverty skyrocketed in the
United Kingdom," Zucman said.

Under Tony Blair's government, it remained at a very high level. And
since then the UK has even seen child poverty rise: more than 30 per
cent of children now live in poverty," he said.

He didn't mention Australia, but Australia is not immune to these global trends either.
And regarding what's happening in Australian politics right now with the
rise of One Nation and the flexing of billionaire wealth and its links
with global influence networks, recent analysis from Alex Fein, the
research and intelligence principal at RedBridge Group, is worth reading.

"What Australia is experiencing is a foreign infiltration of our
democracy," she writes.

[Pauline] Hanson's November address at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, where
she declared Australia an 'economic and social tinderbox' to a room of American conservative powerbrokers, was almost certainly more than a
mere 'legitimising' event.

"The surge since looks less like the natural afterglow that comes from
hanging with kindred spirits and more like a blinding flash after a
local franchise is formally plugged into a near-infinitely funded global apparatus.

*The threat to the social contract*

Mr Zucman is promoting his new book, We Need to Tax Billionaires. It
advocates for a minimum tax on ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

It explains how billionaires in France have become so good at using sophisticated tax arrangements to dramatically reduce their income tax
bills that if they all packed up and moved to the nearest tax haven
tomorrow, the impact on their individual tax bills would be negligible.

"The fact is, they already pay practically nothing," he writes.
The cover of a book

We Need to Tax Billionaires (2026), by Gabriel Zucman.

He says the way in which modern tax systems are rigged in favour of the
ultra wealthy is a fundamental violation of the principle that all
citizens are equal before the law, which is "a pillar of the social
contract in all democratic nations".

"In France, Article 13 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen of 1789 states that contributions to the common expenditure
must be divided among members of the community according to their
ability to pay," he writes in his book.

"At the very least, this can be interpreted to mean that taxes cannot be regressive: the wealthiest people should not be allowed to pay a smaller proportion of their income than the less fortunate. And yet, any way you
slice it, this is exactly what is happening today."

He explains how modern tax systems have become inequality machines.

"Most people can only save after they pay their taxes. The ultra-rich,
once again, are playing a different game: they can save nearly all of
their incomes, unburdened by taxation. Which leads to a
self-perpetuating cycle. The less tax you pay, the easier it is to
accumulate wealth."

And he warns that this spiral risks causing irreparable damage to our democratic ideals.

"Of course, it is hard to know where the tipping point is past which
democracy becomes oligarchy," he writes.

"Is it when the wealth of the ultra-rich exceeds 50 per cent of GDP? One hundred per cent? Two hundred per cent? When they own not 80 per cent of privately held media, but 100 per cent? Or perhaps when they finally get
their hands on our public media?

"Nobody knows the exact concentration of wealth at which the kinds of plutocratic collapse we have seen in history becomes inevitable. The
point of no return is anyone's guess.

"The best we can do is study history and keep a close eye on
developments around the globe in order to form an opinion"


*We have the good oligarchs, you have the bad ones*
... "

*The USA is no longer a liberal democracy*... "


~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

It has become quite clear that the rise of the effective social
*omnipotence* of the global billionaire class more and more resembles
the rise of absolutist feudalism. This was the very socio/econopolitical system that capitalism had promised to overthrow at its beginning, but
in end effect it never really did.

On a planet with finite wealth resources the balance between the rich
and the poor is a zero sum game.
You van only get filthy rich by ruthlessly exploiting others and making
them appallingly poor.

That avalanche of arrogant rhetoric lecturing the needy about their
laziness towards getting wealthy too (if they don't wish to starve to
death) is getting mightily old and lame.
This "born to rule" class' mentality defies the very foundation of
democratic principles.
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