Last fall, Elizabeth Warren got an email from Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, inviting her to speak at the group’s annual meeting in Davos in late January. He was taken with Warren’s sweeping moral critique of winner-take-all capitalism and looking to jolt the heads of state and global financial titans at his glittering conference in the Swiss Alps. Would she come to Davos and address them?
The Massachusetts senator, who was then preparing to run for president, understood immediately the attention such a showdown would bring and thought she needed an idea big enough for the moment. A few weeks later, she settled on one: an annual “wealth tax” of 2% on fortunes over $50 million, slightly higher on billionaires. Working with Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the eminent University of California at Berkeley economists, Warren’s staff calculated that her tax would hit the richest 75,000 people in the U.S. while raising $2.75 trillion in a 10-year period.
