The companion piece to this document diagnosed the problem. Billionaire wealth grew by $5.7 billion per day in 2024 while the annual cost of ending acute global hunger is $40 billion. The world's 3,000 billionaires currently pay an effective tax rate of 0.3 percent on their wealth — less than a secretary, less than a teacher, less than a steel worker — while the systems that could close that gap are blocked by the same people who benefit from leaving them open. Jeffrey Epstein operated for thirty years because the infrastructure of extreme unaccountability made it possible. Rishi Sunak asked a homeless man about business because the insulation of extreme wealth makes it impossible to accurately perceive the conditions of extreme poverty. These are not accidents. They are outputs. And outputs, unlike accidents, have solutions.
This document is structured as a pyramid. The base is what one person can do today, alone, in the next twenty-four hours. The middle is what organized groups of people are already doing and how to join them. The top is what governments and international institutions need to do and what the current state of those proposals actually is. Every level connects to the next. The person who donates $25 to a food bank today is statistically more likely to call their legislator about the Ultra-Millionaire Tax next month than the person who read the diagnosis and felt overwhelmed and did nothing. Start where you are. Scale from there.
What One Person Can Do Before the End of This Week
None of the following requires money you don't have, connections you don't have, or time you don't have. All of them take between five minutes and two hours. All of them are part of the documented evidence base that legislators and advocacy organizations use to measure public pressure. All of them are more effective than not doing them.
Contact your federal representative and both senators about the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. The bill (introduced most recently in March 2026 by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Brendan Boyle) imposes a 2% annual tax on wealth above $50 million and 3% on wealth above $1 billion. As of June 2026 it has 45+ co-sponsors in the House and 7 in the Senate. It needs more. The mechanism: go to house.gov to find your representative, and senate.gov to find your senators. Call or email their constituent offices. You don't need to know the bill number. You can say: "I'm calling to urge Representative [Name] to co-sponsor the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which would require the wealthiest Americans to pay a minimum tax rate on their wealth." That's it. Legislative offices count constituent contacts. A call counts more than an email. A personal email counts more than a form letter. Congressional staff specifically track the volume of constituent contact on specific bills. Volume moves co-sponsorship decisions.
For UK residents: Contact your MP through parliament.uk and ask them to support a UK wealth tax on assets above £10 million. The Wealth Tax Commission (wealthtax.ac.uk), an independent academic body, published a detailed UK proposal in 2020 that remains the most rigorously costed proposal in British policy history. Your MP's position on it is a matter of public record.
Sign and share the Oxfam / Americans for Tax Fairness wealth tax petition — then use it as a conversation starter. Oxfam America, together with Avaaz, Americans for Tax Fairness, and Patriotic Millionaires, has delivered over 200,000 petition signatures representing all 50 states to Congress demanding that legislators prioritize taxing the ultra-rich. The petition is live at oxfamamerica.org. Signing it is the least important thing you can do with it. The most important thing is sharing it with five people who have not signed it yet, with a specific reason why you signed it. "I signed this because the richest 3,000 people in the world pay 0.3% of their wealth in taxes while teachers pay 24%" is a specific reason. Specific reasons convert recipients into signers at a higher rate than generic requests. The 200,000 target grew to that number through exactly this kind of networked sharing, not through advertising.
For global audiences: The Fight Inequality Alliance (fightinequality.org) runs coordinated campaigns across more than 40 countries with local chapters in Kenya, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Brazil, Ecuador, and throughout Europe. Their "Tax the Super Rich" campaign runs petitions and advocacy actions calibrated to each country's legislative environment. Find your country's campaign at fightinequality.org.
Give directly to organizations already doing the immediate-survival work that policy reform has not yet achieved. The WFP USA (wfpusa.org) is the U.S. fundraising partner of the United Nations World Food Programme, which feeds more than 100 million people in 120+ countries annually. $50 provides emergency rations for one person for approximately one month. The International Rescue Committee (rescue.org) provides emergency assistance to people displaced by conflict — including in Gaza and Ukraine — and receives top ratings from Charity Navigator and GiveWell. St. Mungo's (mungos.org) is the UK homelessness charity Dean mentioned in the clip that opened this series: the one he hoped could help him find somewhere to sleep for Christmas. They are still doing that work. They still need funding. Giving to these organizations does not solve the structural problem. It is not meant to. It is what you do while the structural problem is being solved, so that people don't die in the interval between the diagnosis and the cure.
Change your information diet on this specific topic. The research on civic engagement consistently shows that people who maintain regular contact with the legislative process — even at the level of reading what their representative has voted on — are more likely to contact their representatives and more likely to vote on economic issues. Three specific subscriptions that cost nothing: (1) Americans for Tax Fairness (americansfortaxfairness.org) sends weekly updates on tax legislation, including specific vote alerts when the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act and related bills come to the floor. (2) The Tax Justice Network (taxjustice.net) publishes the Taxcast podcast and weekly briefings on international tax avoidance — the specific mechanisms by which the global wealth described in the companion piece is protected. (3) Inequality.org publishes a daily tracker of wealth concentration, legislative developments, and advocacy opportunities organized by issue and geography. None of these are partisan publications in the conventional sense. All of them are advocacy-aligned. Know who you're reading. Read them anyway.
Who Is Already Fighting This and How to Join Them
The individual actions in Tier 1 matter. They also don't scale. The structural problems described in the companion piece were built over fifty years through organized institutional action. They will be addressed through organized institutional action. What follows is a map of the organizations doing that work right now, what specifically they are doing, and how to engage with each at whatever level of capacity you have.
An organization of high-net-worth individuals — people with incomes above $1 million or assets above $5 million — who publicly advocate for higher taxes on themselves and their peers. Founded in 2010, currently with chapters in the U.S. and UK (Patriotic Millionaires UK). Their specific current legislative priorities include four bills introduced or re-introduced in 2025–2026: the Equal Tax Act (H.R. 5336, taxing investment income above $1M at the same rate as labor income), the Oligarch Act of 2025 (H.R. 2912, targeting extreme wealth concentration and converting the estate tax into a true inheritance tax), the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act (in coalition with Warren/Jayapal/Boyle), and the Cost of Living Tax Cut Act. They are part of the Tax the Super Rich Alliance (launched 2025), a coalition of 70 organizations globally. Their significance for individuals who are not millionaires: they provide political and reputational cover for wealth tax proposals that opponents typically attack as "class warfare." A wealthy person saying "tax me more" neutralizes that attack. Supporting their advocacy amplifies that neutralization. You don't need to be a millionaire to follow, share, and amplify their public statements.
A Washington, D.C.-based national campaign organization whose specific focus is the federal tax code and its distributional effects. They coordinated the coalition of 40 unions and advocacy organizations that endorsed the most recent introduction of the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act in March 2026, including SEIU, AFL-CIO, NEA, AFSCME, the Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, and Oxfam America. Their "Wealth Tax Calculator" tool at americansfortaxfairness.org allows visitors to calculate how much the Ultra-Millionaire Tax would raise from specific billionaires — a tool specifically designed to make the abstract concrete and shareable. Entry point for individuals: sign up for their legislative alert network and participate in organized "call days" when specific votes are scheduled. Their call days produce measurable spikes in congressional constituent contacts on specific bills.
An independent international research and advocacy organization focused on tax havens, corporate tax avoidance, and wealth concealment. Their Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions by the opacity of their financial systems and the scale of assets hidden within them — the infrastructure that makes the 0.3% effective billionaire tax rate possible in the first place. They publish the State of Tax Justice report annually, quantifying how much tax revenue is lost globally to offshore evasion (current estimate: approximately $480 billion per year from corporate tax avoidance alone). They are part of the Tax the Super Rich Alliance and coordinate with the EU Tax Observatory (gabriel-zucman.eu), which produced the Zucman G20 report. Entry point: subscribe to their free Taxcast podcast and weekly briefings. Their research is the primary source base for the most credible journalism on wealth taxation globally.
A global movement of more than 60 civil society organizations operating across more than 40 countries, coordinating campaigns on wealth taxation, workers' rights, and public services funding. Their country-level campaigns are designed for the specific legislative environment of each jurisdiction — what works in Kenya is not the same as what works in France — and they connect national campaigns to global moments (G20 meetings, Davos, UN General Assembly sessions) to maximize pressure on international coordination mechanisms. Entry point for anyone outside the United States: fightinequality.org/local-groups to find the chapter or campaign most relevant to your country. For U.S. readers: they coordinate with the Patriotic Millionaires, Oxfam America, and Americans for Tax Fairness as part of the Tax the Super Rich Alliance.
What Governments Need to Do and Where Those Proposals Currently Stand
This section names the specific policy mechanisms, how each works, what each would raise, what the documented obstacles are, and what the current legislative or international status is. The companion piece described why these reforms have been blocked. This section describes the reforms themselves — so that when the political conditions change, which they will, the blueprint is already written and the public already knows what is being asked for.
In June 2024, economist Gabriel Zucman published a blueprint commissioned by Brazil's G20 presidency for a coordinated minimum tax on ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The proposal: a 2% annual minimum tax on the net wealth of the world's approximately 3,000 billionaires. Current effective billionaire tax rate on wealth: 0.3%. The proposal would raise an estimated $200–$250 billion annually from approximately 3,000 individuals — enough to fund the UN WFP's hunger elimination target four to six times over, every year. Extending the minimum to centimillionaires (wealth above $100 million) would add $100–$140 billion annually. The proposal is supported by Brazil, France, Spain, South Africa, and the African Union. It is opposed by the United States and Germany. The mechanism for implementation draws on the same international coordination framework that produced the OECD's 15% global minimum corporate tax: countries agree to a floor, then implement domestically, with "top-up" provisions allowing other countries to collect the difference if any individual jurisdiction fails to implement. The proposal does not require universal adoption to function; a coalition of major economies implementing it creates effective pressure on holdouts by taxing wealth held in non-participating jurisdictions when it flows back to participating ones. Current status: under active G20 discussion; no binding agreement as of June 2026; the U.S. opposes it under the current administration. This is not a dead proposal. It is a proposal waiting for the political conditions that make its adoption possible.
The Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, introduced most recently in March 2026 by Sen. Warren, Rep. Jayapal, and Rep. Boyle, imposes a 2% annual tax on net wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, and 3% on wealth above $1 billion. Saez and Zucman's analysis estimates this raises approximately $3 trillion over ten years in the United States alone. The bill has 45+ House co-sponsors and 7 Senate co-sponsors as of the most recent introduction. It is endorsed by 40+ unions and advocacy organizations including SEIU, AFL-CIO, NEA, Oxfam America, Patriotic Millionaires, and the Sunrise Movement. It has not passed. The obstacles are documented: the bill has never received a floor vote in either chamber; it has been consistently blocked at the committee stage; the Ways and Means Committee, which controls tax legislation in the House, has not held hearings on it. The 2026 midterm elections are the proximate structural intervention point: committee chair assignments change with majority control. A House majority that assigns Ways and Means to a chair willing to hold hearings on the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act is a different legislative environment than the current one.
Carried interest is the mechanism by which hedge fund managers and private equity executives pay the capital gains tax rate (20%) rather than the ordinary income tax rate (up to 37%) on a significant portion of their compensation. Eliminating it would raise approximately $180 billion over ten years, per Joint Committee on Taxation scoring. It has been proposed, scored, and blocked in every major tax reform debate since at least 2007. It was nearly eliminated in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 before being removed at the insistence of Sen. Joe Manchin. It was not included in the Trump tax legislation of 2025. This is not a radical proposal. It is a proposal to close a loophole that treats the fee income of some of the wealthiest individuals in the world as if it were capital appreciation rather than compensation for services. It has no principled economic defense that holds up to scrutiny; its persistence is entirely a function of lobbying expenditure by the private equity and hedge fund industries, which collectively spend tens of millions annually on federal lobbying specifically to protect it. It can be eliminated by a simple majority vote in both chambers and a presidential signature. No constitutional amendment required. No international coordination required. One bill. One signature.
Commercial airline passengers are required by federal law to submit to TSA screening and appear on passenger manifests that are subject to law enforcement access. Private jet passengers are not subject to equivalent requirements. The Secure and Protect Act, proposed following the Epstein case, would extend commercial-equivalent manifest requirements to private aviation. It has not been enacted. The structural significance: the private aviation system that provided the logistical foundation for Epstein's operation for thirty years — no shared terminals, no public records, routes determined entirely by the owner, no documentation accessible without a subpoena — remains intact. This is not primarily a tax reform; it is a transparency and accountability measure. It has bipartisan surface appeal (anti-trafficking framing) and narrow but intense opposition (the private aviation industry and its lobbying arm, the National Business Aviation Association). Its legislative path runs through the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The United States estate tax — the tax on inherited wealth above a threshold at the time of transfer — has been systematically weakened over the past three decades. The 2017 Trump tax cuts doubled the exemption threshold to approximately $11 million per individual ($22 million per married couple), removing the vast majority of estates from any taxation. The 2025 Trump tax legislation extended and expanded these provisions. Patriotic Millionaires' Oligarch Act of 2025 (H.R. 2912) would convert the estate tax into a true inheritance tax — taxing the recipient of inherited wealth rather than the estate of the deceased — with progressive rates that increase as the amount inherited grows, and close the "stepped-up basis" loophole that currently allows heirs to avoid capital gains taxes on inherited appreciated assets entirely. The stepped-up basis provision alone costs the federal government an estimated $41 billion annually in foregone revenue, primarily benefiting the wealthiest estates. Current status: introduced in the 119th Congress; referred to Ways and Means; no floor vote scheduled.
The policy debate on wealth taxation is sometimes presented as if the goal is redistribution as an end in itself. The goal is the public services and infrastructure that wealth concentration has defunded. The $200–$250 billion annually from the Zucman G20 proposal, combined with the $3 trillion over ten years from the U.S. Ultra-Millionaire Tax, combined with the $180 billion from carried interest reform, represents a fiscal base sufficient to: fund universal pre-K for every child in the United States; eliminate federal student debt for the bottom 60% of borrowers; fund a significant expansion of Section 8 housing vouchers that would end housing insecurity for the approximately 600,000 Americans experiencing homelessness on any given night; and contribute substantially to the $40 billion annual WFP budget for global hunger elimination. These are not speculative calculations. They are standard distributional analyses performed by the Congressional Budget Office, the Tax Policy Center, and the Brookings Institution for the specific bills named above. The money exists. The policy vehicles exist. The political will is the variable. LI — The specific programmatic allocations that would result from revenue collection are subject to legislative appropriations processes and cannot be guaranteed by any advocacy document. The revenue estimates themselves are C1, drawn from cited CBO and JCT analyses.
Why This Moment Is Different and Why That Matters
The wealth tax debate has been running for decades. What is different in 2026 is the combination of three things that have not previously existed simultaneously: an international blueprint (the Zucman G20 proposal) that is technically sophisticated enough to withstand serious economic scrutiny; a global coalition (the Tax the Super Rich Alliance, 70 organizations across 40 countries) with the organizational infrastructure to coordinate pressure at the international level; and a documented public legitimacy crisis around extreme wealth that is broader and deeper than anything since the 1930s. The Oxfam data — billionaires 4,000 times more likely than ordinary citizens to hold political office — is not just a statistic. It is the specific mechanism by which the people who could implement these policies are the people who benefit from not implementing them. That loop is the problem. Organized civic pressure is how you break the loop. It has broken it before. The New Deal was not the product of enlightened billionaires. The Civil Rights Act was not the product of legislators who independently decided it was time. The Voting Rights Act was not the product of a president who arrived at the decision on his own. These things happened because organized people created the conditions in which the political cost of not acting exceeded the political cost of acting. That is the only mechanism that has ever worked. It is still the only one available.
Dean said he'd like to get through Christmas first. That was December 2022. He has gotten through three Christmases since then, by what means we don't know. The Prime Minister who asked him about business was voted out of office in July 2024 in one of the largest electoral defeats in British political history. The structural conditions that put Dean in that food bank line — the 0.3% effective tax rate, the $5.7 billion per day in billionaire wealth accumulation, the blocked legislation, the lobbied loopholes, the private jets without manifests, the islands without oversight — remain intact. They have bills attached to them now. They have blueprints. They have coalitions. They have the arithmetic on their side. What they need is the organized political will of people who read the diagnosis and decided that being outraged was not enough. This document is for those people. The actions are above. The organizations are named. The legislation has bill numbers. The only thing left is the doing.
Legislation (U.S.): Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, introduced March 26, 2026 (Jayapal, Warren, Boyle; 45+ House co-sponsors, 7 Senate co-sponsors); Equal Tax Act, H.R. 5336 (introduced Sept. 11, 2025, Ramirez; Ways and Means Committee); Oligarch Act of 2025, H.R. 2912; Secure and Protect Act (multiple sessions; not enacted). Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation distributional analyses for each bill. Carried interest: JCT scoring (~$180B/10 years); history through Inflation Reduction Act (2022); Manchin role: multiple contemporaneous reporting sources. Estate tax stepped-up basis: Tax Policy Center, "$41B annually" estimate.
International proposals: Gabriel Zucman, "A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Tax on Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals," commissioned by Brazil's G20 presidency (June 25, 2024; gabriel-zucman.eu/files/report-g20.pdf). NPR, "At the G20, a billionaire tax is being proposed" (Aug. 4, 2024). ICTD, "How to tax the ultra-rich" (Aug. 2024). Tax Justice Network, "G20 blueprint adds to growing wealth tax momentum" (2024). 0.3% effective billionaire tax rate: Zucman G20 report; OECD global minimum corporate tax: 136 countries, Oct. 2021.
Norway wealth tax analysis: IMGlobal Wealth, "Norway's Tax Experiment: A Costly Exodus" (2026); Tax Foundation, "Wealth Tax Impact" (2024); Tax Foundation Europe, "Wealth Taxes in Europe, 2025"; Tax Journal, "Wealth tax: the debate continues" (2023). Revenue: NOK 32 billion (~$3.3B) in 2023, IMI Daily (Feb. 2026).
Organizations: Patriotic Millionaires (patrioticmillionaires.org); Americans for Tax Fairness (americansfortaxfairness.org); Tax Justice Network (taxjustice.net); Fight Inequality Alliance (fightinequality.org); WFP USA (wfpusa.org); IRC (rescue.org); St. Mungo's (mungos.org); Oxfam America (oxfamamerica.org); Avaaz (avaaz.org); Inequality.org. Tax the Super Rich Alliance launched 2025: 70 organizations. Oxfam/ATF/Patriotic Millionaires: 200,000+ petition signatures to Congress, per Oxfam America (July 2025). Jayapal/Warren/Boyle bill: 40+ endorsing organizations listed in Rep. Jayapal press release (March 26, 2026).
Revenue and cost estimates: Saez & Zucman, NBER (2025): ~$3T/10 years from Ultra-Millionaire Tax. WFP: $40B/year to end acute global hunger. Oxfam 2025 report: billionaires 4,000 times more likely than ordinary citizens to hold political office (drawn from academic research cited in report). Oxfam: $5.7B/day billionaire wealth growth (2024). Section 8 housing: HUD data on voucher shortfall; 600,000 experiencing homelessness: HUD Annual Homeless Assessment Report (2024).
Cross-series references: I'd Like to Get Through Christmas First (QP, June 14, 2026, companion diagnosis) · What He Is, Part II: The Playbook and the Antidote (legal/civic resistance tools) · What He Is, Part III: The Broken Gate (structural democratic reform) · Grand Architecture: The Syndicate
Legal risk level: LOW. All factual claims are anchored to cited primary sources. Legislative status information reflects June 2026 public record. Organizational descriptions are drawn from organizations' own published materials and verified reporting. Revenue estimates are drawn from CBO, JCT, and peer-reviewed economic analysis; LI designation applied where programmatic allocation is uncertain.