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“Since the attack, the Jewish community of Djerba has not been visited or contacted by any members of the government,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt of the Conference of European Rabbis.

By JNS

Two Jewish cousins were among those murdered on May 9 near a Tunisian synagogue. Four days later, Tunisian President Kais Saied compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.

“While Tunisians protected Jews during the Holocaust, today elderly, women and children are being bombed in Gaza,” he said.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, called on European governments to condemn Saied’s statement, which he said implies “that the Jews of Tunisia are responsible for the bombing of Gaza.”

“Through such wanton remarks, the president continues to incite further hatred and even attacks against the country’s Jewish community, heaven forbid,” Goldschmidt said. “Since the attack, the Jewish community of Djerba has not been visited or contacted by any members of the government. The Tunisian president together with the relevant authorities should instead be offering support to the Jewish community and working to ensure its safety.”

Aviel Haddad, 30, a dual Israeli-Tunisian, was killed on May 9 alongside his cousin Benjamin Haddad, a 42-year-old French citizen. Three security personnel were also killed when a Tunisian National Guard member opened fire on people near Ghriba Synagogue on May 9 as Lag B’Omer celebrations were underway. A dozen others were injured.

Haddad was buried in Israel on May 12.

The post Days after two Jews shot dead, Tunisian president compares Israel to Nazis appeared first on World Israel News.

“Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. The Red Sea parted, big deal. It’s not the first time that happened.”

By World Israel News Staff

Former New York City mayor and lawyer for Donald Trump Rudy Giuliani mocked Jews for observing Passover 3,000 years later, a former staffer claimed in a $10 million lawsuit she filed Monday which also accused him of sexual assault and harassment.

“Jews want to go through their freaking Passover all the time, man oh man,” Giuliani was cited in the complaint as saying in comments that were apparently recorded.

“Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. The Red Sea parted, big deal. It’s not the first time that happened.”

Noelle Dunphy, who began working for Giuliani in January 2019 as his director of business development on a salary of $1 million a year, accused Giuliani of “wide-ranging sexual assault and harassment.”

Dunphy also accuses him of withholding salaries and “alcohol-drenched rants that included sexist and racist remarks.”

Giuliani is also accused of mocking Jewish men’s penis sizes and commenting about the “‘freaking Arabs’ and Jews.”

Giuliani “often demanded that she work naked, in a bikini, or in short shorts with an American flag on them that he bought for her,” Dunphy’s complaint claimed.

A spokesperson for Giuliani said he “vehemently” denied the allegations.

“This is pure harassment and an attempt at extortion,” the spokesperson said.

The post Ex-NY mayor Giuliani to Jews: ‘Get over Passover, it was 3,000 years ago’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Last week at Grinnell College in Iowa, undergraduate resident advisers with the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers, the first independent undergrad labor union in the country, went on strike. We spoke with two of the workers about why they walked out.

Grinnell College students protesting for bargaining in 2018. (UGSDW / Facebook)

On Wednesday, May 10, undergraduate student workers at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, went on strike. The workers are represented by the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW), the first independent undergraduate labor union in the United States. The union says it is going on strike in response to the administration’s refusal to address its contract demands over the pay and working conditions of undergraduate community advisers (CAs), the college’s version of resident advisers (RAs).

After the union announced the strike, workers say, the administration sent an email to the campus community declaring the walkout illegal and threatening workers who participated with retaliation; the union has since filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge. Last week, Jacobin contributor Sara Wexler sat down with two student workers to discuss the situation of Grinnell CAs and why and how they organized to strike.

Sara Wexler

Could you give some background on your union’s history? Who does UGSDW represent?

Hannah Sweet

Back in 2016, the dining hall won their union election, and the union was established and recognized by the college and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It began exclusively as the union representing the dining workers.

Then in 2018, the union attempted an expansion campaign, but the college, when it heard about this campaign, hired a bunch of union-busting lawyers and got in the way of the expansion election. So the election went to the NLRB. Because it was during Donald Trump’s presidency and he had appointed a bunch of anti-labor and anti-worker people there, we didn’t want the election to go to the board and have it decide against us, and then create a precedent for all other undergraduate students around the country.

So we pulled back on the expansion efforts, and this past spring is when we reached a neutrality agreement with the college. It has a new president now, and I think the president thought this would be a cool opportunity. And I think it is along the lines of, if the college has the first fully independent, fully unionized undergraduate campus in the country, that looks good for its social-justice messaging. So we had a neutrality agreement, we won the expansion, and now we’re here.

UGSDW represents almost all student workers on campus. The only exception would be our student-government association, which is independent and has its own constitution — that would be our student-government president and positions like that. The other exception would be grant-based, fellowship-type work that people are doing that comes from outside revenue sources.

Otherwise we represent everyone. Our student body is about 1,700 people. About seven hundred are officially members. They’ve signed their union cards and they’re in our database, but we represent all student workers on campus, no matter if they have become a member or not. We want to make sure that every student has a voice in what their work looks like and feels like they are being treated fairly.

Sara Wexler

Why are you all on strike?

Eli Brotman

We are on strike because the college is not moving to provide us with any of the working conditions that we’re asking for, which includes wage-discrimination policies and sick leave. They’ve been bargaining in bad faith, especially in the past couple days. They’ve been lying to us, using scare tactics to discourage people from striking and protesting their lack of good faith.

Hannah Sweet

The past seven months we’ve been negotiating a contract with the college. So bargaining has been dragging on for a pretty long time now.

We reached a place where the college, especially on economic issues — wages for community advisers and also wages for the whole campus — has been like, “We’re not moving unless you take action.” So we took action for CAs specifically.

CAs are currently compensated with a room grant, which is well-below industry standard, where most of our parent institutions are getting at least room and board. But in the college’s most recent proposal for community advisers, it has proposed to change our compensation to hourly pay with the campus base wage, which right now is at $13.25.

Ultimately, that would be a big pay cut for CAs during the school year. We will get paid training, which is something we’ve never had, so that’s a step in the right direction. But because we won’t have any hour guarantees during the school year, there’s no assurance that we will make anything near the room grant. So we may not be able to cover housing costs anymore.

Eli Brotman

It’s a slap in the face. Both of us are CAs, and we work hard to keep this community going, both through programming and responding to emergencies and other issues in our community. But the college knows that it doesn’t really need to move on a lot of these issues, because it relies on the first-year class assuming our CA positions, and a lot of the CAs now aren’t returning next year.

Hannah Sweet

The college is a $3 billion institution. It has more than enough money to pay us fairly and pay us even more than that, but it relies on the fact that there will be students who want to help out their community. It’ll search out positions like this. That makes us easier to exploit, because we’re not just doing this for a wage; we’re doing it because we care about the betterment of our fellow students, and we care about having safe and healthy resident communities.

The college is a $3 billion institution. It has more than enough money to pay us fairly.

The fact that a lot of people aren’t returning next year is a reflection of how inadequately we are treated. Ultimately, that’s not going to benefit students. That’s not going to benefit the residents’ full-time staff, because they don’t have anyone who has this experience that will keep coming back. They basically have to train a whole new staff every year, rather than keeping people on who have been in the role, who know how to create these relationships that are necessary to build strong hall communities and so on.

The college markets itself off the idea that this is a social-justice institution. It says that this is an incredibly progressive campus, but then the way that it treats its workers, the way that it has conducted itself throughout this bargaining process, has been very antithetical to the values that it puts on the front of its website and that it puts in its mission statements.

Sara Wexler

Could you give some more detail on CAs’ working conditions and compensation?

Hannah Sweet

The room grant is very nice to have; that’s a good $6,000 that I don’t have to come up with every year. But this year, Grinnell increased the tuition to about $80,000 — who can afford that? So that small grant doesn’t come close to what we need to be able to afford this school and afford rising costs of living.

Even though we’re in a rural area, we depend on the college; it sets the price for everything, which means that we can’t go other places for less expensive housing, less expensive food, things like that. Even most of the wages in town are higher than wages that the college is paying for students on campus. Currently, the base wage on campus is around $8.25 or $8.50 an hour, which is incredibly low. Most jobs don’t make more than $10.

The only jobs that make over $10 are dining jobs — which is because they’ve had this union — and jobs off campus, where you can make $15, close to $20 an hour. But there’s a lot of reasons why students can’t go off campus for jobs. They may have a work-study requirement in their financial-aid package; they may be an international student, so they legally cannot work off campus.

It creates a huge divide within the campus community when it comes to people’s financial backgrounds. There’s a lot of students who are on financial aid who are working their asses off up to the twenty hours that we’re allowed to work per week, and then there’s a lot of students who are fortunate enough to have someone else paying for their tuition and can use that time in other ways.

We’re responsible for creating relationships with residents, looking out for their well-being, and that’s a 24-7 job. That’s not something that I can clock in and clock out of.

Also, as community advisers, we’re responsible for creating relationships with residents, looking out for their well-being, and that’s a 24-7 job. That’s not something that I can clock in and clock out of. I think that that puts us in a unique position in terms of compensation, because. . . . How do you compensate someone for twenty-four hours a day? Because we’re on all the time. If a resident tells us something, if they confide in us, we’ll be thinking about that for the next couple days.

Eli Brotman

The training to be a community adviser here is pretty subpar. We all come into this role because we’re community-minded and we have social skills that will serve our community well. But when responding to mental health crises — which happen here, because it’s in the middle of Iowa and we’re stuck in two square miles — we really are not equipped well to handle these issues at all. The training is super limited; the training is also not stimulating at all.

Another issue is that there is no policy for sick leave. We’re on the job 24-7. So, if we get sick, how do we call out when there’s no sick leave as a community adviser?

Hannah Sweet

Another thing I want to emphasize is that our strike is not just for us. We are tying our demands to the working conditions of all students on campus. If I work in the dining hall and I wake up sick that morning, there’s no process for me to call in and say, “Hey, I’m sick, I can’t come in today.” That should be baseline; every job should have a process for that. But then, especially if you’re working with food and you’re post-COVID, it’s untenable to not have a process for that.

Eli Brotman

One more thing sticks out to me on why we need to move forward on these issues. One of my good friends is a need-based student, so they’re enrolled in Grinnell College on a full scholarship. But because the college only provides room-grant stipends, my friend was sucked into the CA position and now receives no payment whatsoever. So, they’re working sixteen hours a week, and the college is not moving on compensating this individual for the work they’ve done this entire year, simply because they’re not willing to fund this room-grant stipend in another way.

That ties back to one of our demands for compensation: we want at least room and board, and there needs to be an option for paying a financial equivalent of the stipend. There are students on this campus who would be amazing community advisers, who want to have an opportunity to look out for their peers and create programs and make this a better campus. But because they already have their room and board covered by a scholarship or their financial-aid package, they can’t become community advisers unless they choose to work for free, which is not acceptable.

Sara Wexler

When did the organizing for the strike start? Were there any specific events or catalysts that led you all to this point?

Hannah Sweet

Whenever you’re bargaining a contract, there’s always the possibility that you could go on strike. Most employers are not just going to give you everything that you ask for. So we’ve been planning for this since we expanded in some ways.

We’ve taken a strategy of escalating action. On the first day of bargaining, we had a button action, where we had everyone in the campus community wear a button that says, “Grinnell Works Because We Do, Fair Contract Now,” and that had our little logo on it.

Then, we’ve had a couple very visible rallies. Grinnell hosts a junior visit day every spring, and that’s when prospective students come in. We held a rally for higher wages that day, and a couple hours after we held the rally, the college called us up, and it was like, “Next bargaining session, we’re talking about wages.” It raised the wage offer about $1.25 from what its prior offer was. So clearly, collective action works.

Then, before spring break, back in March, we hosted a walkout. So we had an evening without student work: at 5:00 p.m. all students walked off the job, or if their shifts started later, they didn’t show up after that. Again, the next bargaining session, Grinnell raised its wage offer again. This communicated to us, one, that we were able to get a good buy-in from the student body and from our membership to participate in a larger-scale strike, and two, that the college would respond to our direct action and that it’ll take our threats seriously.

In the next month or so as we kept bargaining, it became clear that on some of our key issues — like the $15 minimum wage for all student workers in an hourly position, the CA room-and-board grant or the financial stipend, and a process to address workplace harassment and discrimination — the college was not going to move on those.

We decided that this portion of our membership, CAs, seems really bought in; we know we can mobilize them, so we’re going to vote on a strike. We had a strike vote, and now we’re here.

Sara Wexler

Are all student workers on strike or just the CAs?

Hannah Sweet

CAs primarily are on strike, but a number of other workplaces have committed to striking in solidarity. Union membership as a whole voted and authorized the strike with the knowledge that it would primarily be CAs, but that we’re trying to get as many workplaces to strike in solidarity as well.

Sara Wexler

How has the Grinnell administration reacted so far? Can you tell me about the ULP charge?

Hannah Sweet

On May 9, the evening before the strike, the college sent an email to the entire campus falsely calling our strike unlawful because we haven’t reached impasse yet, which is not true. You do not need to reach impasse before you declare a strike.

Then in that email, the college threatened to fire and retaliate against people who went on strike and anyone who decided to honor the picket line. That would particularly target our dining workers and then other full-time staff, like custodial staff who were unionized under the Teamsters. In both those contracts, there are no-strike clauses, so they legally can’t strike with the contract. But there’s a provision that says that workers are allowed to individually choose to not cross a picket line and that there wouldn’t be any retaliation. They wouldn’t lose their jobs.

The evening before the strike, the college sent an email to the entire campus falsely calling our strike unlawful.

So there was a lot of misinformation being sent to students, faculty, staff, and community members, and a lot of fear and intimidation, with that email. We got on that right away; we tried to clear things up. Yesterday [May 10] we started our strike, and we did a full-day picket just to get visibility and then also to allow our dining workers the choice to not cross the picket line. So they were able to strike in solidarity yesterday, which was pretty cool.

Then this morning [May 11], the college sent union leadership an email that unilaterally falsely and illegally declared impasse. It said, “We’re at impasse. We’re not moving anymore.” That is not the case, because in the most recent bargaining session we had, there were a number of issues and provisions that both parties indicated that they were willing to move on.

Basically, the college has said that it’s not going to bargain with us or even meet with us while we’re on strike. So we filed a ULP this morning, against bargaining in bad faith and intimidation. This is a massive escalation in illegal union busting that’s in line with some tactics that were employed by Temple University’s administration in Temple grad workers’ recent strike.

Eli Brotman

It’s remarkable to see what effect it has on student workers, because the scare tactics work. When I’ve been talking to my fellow CAs, gauging whether or not they feel comfortable striking, I’m getting the sense that. . . . I’m passionate enough about this issue where I’m OK with possibly losing my room grant; that thought has passed through my head . . .

Hannah Sweet

Which is illegal, by the way. If the college did that, it’d be incredibly illegal.

Eli Brotman

But for a lot of people, even just the thought of that is unacceptable, and it’s remarkable to see just how scary the administration’s tactics are for a lot of the CAs. It also shows how reliant students are here on their labor, and that the college is, again, disregarding what the students need.

Sara Wexler

Can you say what’s next?

Hannah Sweet

We are going to continue to strike until the college meets our demands. That’s first and foremost what we’ll be continuing to do the next two weeks. Also, hopefully that ULP gets resolved soon and comes back in our favor, which would force the college back to the table to negotiate with us. But we will continue to be reaching out to the college, giving it times that we can meet to bargain, and hopefully it meets us at the table.

Sara Wexler

Just last week, Columbia University’s undergraduate resident advisers won their union election. Have you been in touch with other undergraduate workers?

Hannah Sweet

We’ve been in touch with other undergraduate labor efforts. We were in constant contact with Dartmouth, specifically. Its dining hall won an election by an almost 100 percent margin, and they recently won a $21 base wage. That’s not including experience pay, and I think they have some type of tuition adjustment as well. They have paid sick leave, a ton of things.

They won a lot. So, after we heard what happened, we reached out to them. They won all that with just the threat of a strike. After they sent that strike notification to their university, the university was like, “Let’s come back to the table,” and basically accepted all their demands. We’re in contact with workers at Kenyon as well, who have been attempting to get their union recognized for a long time.

We also have a lot of unions that reach out to us, or a lot of people on undergraduate campuses across the country being like, “We really like what you’re doing; we’d love to hear more about it.” We’re trying to support everyone as much as we possibly can. I’m incredibly motivated and inspired by the path and the momentum that the undergraduate labor movement has taken on these past couple years. It seems like every other day I get a news alert about another undergraduate campus filing an election.

Sara Wexler

Has organizing and being part of a union changed your perspective on the university?

Hannah Sweet

I feel like none of us came into college so disillusioned, but we knew that the college’s bottom line was its profit and protecting its precious endowment. But that has just become clearer over this process. We ran the numbers the other day, and the cost of giving every CA room and board is about $400,000, which is pocket change compared to the $3 billion that the college has in the bank. That makes its values pretty clear.

I also think that this whole process reaffirmed the importance of collective action and organizing, because I was both on the organizing committee in the union, and I also was part of the bargaining team. I sat at the table during negotiations, and I think I had this this idea that, if you make good points and you back up your arguments and use logic, people have to agree with you. But no matter how good of a debater you are, no matter how good of an orator you are, they don’t have to move, because they have the power. In this situation, we’re college students with no money to our names. So our main tool is our ability to withhold our labor and to organize and put our values into action.

Eli Brotman

And it’s interesting trying to build unity at a high-level institution, because people are so overwhelmed with homework and what needs to be done to succeed at school here.

Hannah Sweet

Also, at a campus community that’s very stratified in terms of economic situations and racial identity and things like that. We are at a predominantly white institution, and this is a private college, so you have people from incredibly rich backgrounds. Then you also have people who are QuestBridge scholarship recipients, who are on full rides and so on.

Eli Brotman

It seems like that’s a bit of a strategy that the college relies on, and it’s remarkable to see just how effective that is. I think that’s the case for the undergraduate labor movement across the nation. It requires additional sacrifice to really move large institutions on these issues.

Sara Wexler

Anything else?

Hannah Sweet

At an institution that has so much money, yet still has students who are food insecure or who are homeless — that’s untenable. If you have the resources, not a single student should have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or how they’re going to put a roof over their head, or how they’re going to afford to go here.

College is a really fulfilling experience: there’s so many connections you make with other people — the relationships you build, the knowledge that you’re able to gain. Everyone should be able to take advantage of that no matter what their economic status is.

Eli Brotman

And everybody should have access to help when they need it instead of being shuffled around. It’s cool to see so many undergrad labor unions start, because it seems like a collective realization that we need to look out for each other.

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The post The Party’s Over, the Gloves Are Off appeared first on Global Research.

A Canadian wealth tax could raise funds sufficient for universal public pharmacare, free tuition for postsecondary education, 100,000 nonmarket affordable homes per year, and a major increase in public transit investment. The country needs a wealth tax now.

The Bank of Nova Scotia building at King and Bay Streets in Toronto, Canada, April 13, 2023. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

The rise of extreme inequality has provoked growing calls for an annual wealth tax on the superrich around the world, and Canada is no exception.

Backed by a growing body of economic research, proposals for a wealth tax have high levels of support among Canadians across party lines. Yet, an annual wealth tax is nowhere to be seen on the federal government’s agenda.

Based on up-to-date modeling of a moderate wealth tax, my analysis shows that this tax could provide a huge source of ongoing revenue for public investment while helping to rein in extreme inequality.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives research showed that the eighty-seven richest families in Canada each held, on average, 4,448 times more wealth than the typical family — and more than the twelve million Canadians at the bottom of the economic ladder combined.

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that the richest 1percent in Canada controls 25 percent of the country’s wealth. Recent academic estimates have put that figure even higher at 29 percent.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaire wealth continued to skyrocket in Canada and around the world. At the time of writing, sixty-one Canadian billionaires alone now control $324 billion in wealth. Some of the same superrich benefited as owners of large corporations amid ballooning corporate profits, which rolled in even as inflation rose rapidly and Canadians struggled with an escalating cost of living.

This type of extreme inequality has damaging consequences: economic, social, and political.

High levels of inequality hurt economic growth, as organizations like the IMF and OECD have begun to acknowledge in recent years. Inequality is linked to worse performance on a wide range of health and social outcomes, as international epidemiological research shows. Economic inequalities also contribute to inequalities in political influence, which skew public policy priorities toward the preferences of the rich, deprive governments of revenue for public investments, and reinforce the concentration of wealth.

It’s no surprise that wealth taxes have risen to prominence under these circumstances, sparked by proposals from US Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In Canada, the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) has put forward a proposal for a wealth tax, albeit a much smaller one than proposed by Sanders or Warren.

A slew of new economic research on wealth taxes has emerged in the past few years, showing that a well-designed wealth tax has the potential to be efficient and effective, help reduce extreme inequality, and raise a large amount of revenue for public investment. An early wave of research was spearheaded by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman and quickly extended more broadly, including a large body of evidence assembled by the UK Wealth Tax Commission.

A Wealth Tax for the Common Good

In the Canadian context, how much revenue could a moderate annual wealth tax raise? I have modeled revenues for a wealth tax applying to net wealth above a threshold of $10 million with three brackets and rates: 1 percent above $10 million, 2 percent above $50 million, and 3 percent above $100 million.

Net wealth is defined as total assets (including financial assets, real property, etc.) minus any outstanding debts (including mortgages). Under this tax structure, the first $10 million of net wealth for any family is unaffected: only the portion of wealth above the threshold is taxed. A household “merely” in the wealthiest top 1 percent is not rich enough to be impacted by this tax, which affects only about the richest 0.5 percent in the first year, representing roughly eighty-seven thousand families. An even tinier share is affected by the higher brackets: roughly 8,500 families with wealth above $50 million and 3,100 above $100 million.

A wealth tax of this kind in Canada would raise an estimated $32 billion in the first year alone. This would rise to an estimated $51 billion by the tenth year and a cumulative $409 billion over ten years.

In estimating these revenues, I use an updated version of the High-net-worth Family Database from the Parliamentary Budget Office, which models wealth distribution in Canada. My estimates are informed by the latest research from academic economists specializing in wealth taxes.

The wealth-tax structure suggested here goes beyond the smaller tax proposed by the NDP in the last federal election, which would apply a 1 percent rate to net wealth above $10 million with no further brackets. But even this smaller wealth tax would be an important step and raise significant revenue: an estimated $19 billion in its first year, $31 billion by the tenth year, and $246 billion over a ten-year window.

The US-based proposals for a wealth tax from Sanders and Warren would go much further, applying rates as high as 6 percent on wealth over $1 billion and 8 percent over $10 billion. More aggressive wealth-tax proposals of these kinds should be part of the debate in Canada, too. They would be needed to make a lasting dent in the fortunes of the wealthiest few. Still, for a small country like Canada, acting as a first mover by implementing a wealth tax, imposing moderate rates rising to 3 percent may be a sensible place to start.

Kneecapping Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Can a wealth tax withstand the efforts of the rich to avoid it? The growing economic research on this question says yes. As leading economists like Saez and Zucman emphasize, levels of tax avoidance and evasion are not laws of nature, but rather are determined by policy choices. We largely know how to crack down on tax avoidance and evasion, but what too often has been missing is political will.

Some key design features of a wealth tax are essential to make it effective and enforceable. For example, a modern wealth tax must be comprehensive, applying equally to all types of assets so that there is no incentive to shift wealth into asset classes that are exempt from the tax (e.g., no special exemptions for privately held businesses or primary residences, which weakened some older European wealth taxes). Third-party reporting of assets from financial institutions must be mandatory, building on the type of capital-gains income reporting already required under the existing income-tax system.

The Sanders and Warren wealth-tax proposals also include a steep “exit tax” of 40 percent on expatriation, an approach which could be applied here in recognition of the contribution of Canadian society to creating huge fortunes. Alternatively, the UK Wealth Tax Commission suggests a design in which annual wealth-tax obligations continue to apply for a set number of years in cases of emigration. Focusing wealth taxes on the superrich — which, as discussed above, would only initially apply to about eighty-seven thousand families in Canada — also makes it easier to carry out frequent audits, which would become an ongoing threat for attempted tax shirkers.

Recent economic research discusses these design and enforcement questions in more detail (including ingenious approaches to issues like arriving at valuations for large privately held businesses).

Still, to be cautious, the wealth-tax revenue estimates above already incorporate the assumption of some leakage through tax avoidance, evasion, and other behavioral responses. Specifically, I reduce the tax base to account for such responses in line with the economic research on wealth taxes. The rate used by Saez and Zucman based on their survey of the wealth-tax literature is 16 percent, though they emphasize that this should be considered an “upper bound” and that well-designed and enforced wealth taxes should be able to achieve lower levels of behavioral response. Indeed, the UK Wealth Tax Commission tended toward a lower estimate, with a suggested range of 7 to 17 percent for that country, and recent research examining the potential for a European Union–wide wealth tax also arrived at a lower estimate.

As another layer of conservatism, my revenue estimates above have also deducted 2 percent to ensure a very generous allowance for administration and enforcement of a wealth tax ($654 million in the first year and rising). The effectiveness of stronger tax enforcement on the rich and large corporations — with or without a wealth tax — is underlined by a variety of recent analyses from the Parliamentary Budget Office, which suggest that each dollar invested in tax enforcement pays back multiples in revenue generated.

Repossessing the Ill-Gotten Gains of the Superrich

There’s no shortage of badly needed public investments that a wealth tax could help fund.

Let’s put in context the main revenue estimates above: namely, that a federal wealth tax on the richest few could raise $32 billion in revenue in its first year and $409 billion over ten years.

That’s enough to pay for universal public pharmacare, free tuition for postsecondary education, one hundred thousand nonmarket affordable homes each year, and a major increase in public transit investment combined. Each of these investments would also have significant knock-on benefits for the Canadian economy.

This is just one set of possible uses of these revenues among many.

To be sure, a wealth tax isn’t a panacea in the fight against extreme inequality nor as a source of government revenue. On tax policy alone, a suite of complementary measures is also needed. These include ending the special treatment of capital-gains income, increased tax rates on the highest incomes, raising corporate tax rates, taxing wealthy landowners, and investing in tax enforcement. Beyond tax policy, Canada also needs — among other things — stronger labor standards, higher minimum wages, and more union organizing by workers to increase their power in the workplace.

Proposals for a wealth tax enjoy massive and consistent public support in Canada, reaching 89 percent in national polling, including 83 percent of Conservative voters. Despite this level of popularity, the wealthy in this country have so far seemingly managed to keep it largely off the policy agenda.

Such a stark disconnect between public opinion and public policy points to a broader deficiency in our democracy, which requires concerted working-class and social-movement organizing to overcome. If that movement power can be built, the policy tools to fight extreme inequality are at our fingertips.

Wealth Tax Revenue Estimates (Billions of Dollars)

2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
2032

Gross revenue
$32.7
$34.3
$36.2
$38.2
$40.4
$42.5
$44.7
$47.0
$49.4
$52.0

Funds for admin / enforcement
$0.7
$0.7
$0.7
$0.8
$0.8
$0.8
$0.9
$0.9
$1.0
$1.0

Net revenue
$32.0  
$33.6  
$35.4  
$37.5  
$39.6  
$41.6  
$43.8  
$46.0  
$48.4  
$50.9  

 

Tax rates applied on net wealth: 1% above $10 million, 2% above $50 million, and 3% above $100 million.

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Twenty-one members of Congress last week called for lifting US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, including most of the Squad. The pushback is needed: sanctions are a cruel economic weapon that hurts average people — and has spurred a surge of economic refugees.

Activists carry Venezuelan and Cuban flags during a protest rejecting President Joe Biden’s policy of sanctions on June 10, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (Ringo Chiu / AFP via Getty Images)

One of the defining features of our era has been the loss of a domestic political appetite for more US wars. But a similar pushback to Washington’s use of sanctions has been slow to follow, despite the fact that US sanctions are demonstrably cruel, indiscriminate, ineffective, and often illegal.

The near-term prospects for a groundswell of US opposition to sanctions are basically nonexistent at this point. But we may be seeing the beginnings of one taking shape: last week saw twenty-one House Democrats send Joe Biden a letter calling on the president to end US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela and review Donald Trump–era sanctions policy more generally, in light of the “border crisis,” which has seen a surge in migrants at the southern border (though one that is lower than expected) since the expiration of the Donald Trump–era Title 42 order.

Calling the sanctions “a critical contributing factor in the current increase in migration,” the letter points to “their grave humanitarian toll on the peoples of those countries” and the “significant logistical challenges” it is creating for US authorities. But the letter also stresses that “there are also strong moral grounds” to lift the sanctions and that US policy should seek to not “exacerbate the suffering of the innocent people whose freedom we seek to advance.”

Organized by two representatives of border states, Reps. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) — a cochair of Biden’s 2024 campaign and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) very first congressional endorser, respectively — the letter was cosigned by a number of progressive elected officials, including Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Chuy García (D-IL), and six of the newly expanded “Squad” of progressive and socialist members of Congress.

The signatures of Squad members Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, and Ayanna Pressley were missing from the letter. Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern, who has repeatedly called on Biden to lift sanctions against Venezuela in the past, also didn’t sign the letter, and his Northampton office was met by protests from the Anti-Imperialism Action Committee, an anti-capitalist activist collective based in Western Massachusetts, and other activists as a result.

Political shifts in Congress don’t happen overnight, and are usually the fruit of small, symbolic measures like this letter, adding up bit by bit to slowly shift what’s politically acceptable.

Some of the progressive signatories have taken this message to other platforms. At a May 11 House Agriculture Committee meeting, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) — one of the newly minted Squad members who won his seat in these past midterms — spoke about the failure of the decades-long US blockade on Cuba in fostering democracy and called for “revisiting our policies that push people out of their home countries,” emphasizing the economic costs to the US economy that result.

“I don’t think that it serves us to be starving people abroad,” he said. “I think it helps Americans for us to be feeding people all over the world.”

Khanna similarly took this message to a venue where viewers are unlikely to have heard criticism of Biden’s continuation of Trump–era sanctions policy: MSNBC, on the Morning Joe show.

“Look at what’s causing people to flee Venezuela and Cuba,” he urged. “The Republicans are saying, ‘let’s sanction them more.’ That’s causing more people to actually leave. Let’s look at rational sanction policy so we’re not causing the influx.”

Progressive criticism of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela — both of which are explicitly aimed at fomenting regime change in the countries — have been backed up by Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy advisor for former president Barack Obama.

“This is an obvious thing that is sitting right in front of the Biden administration, to just go back to the kind of openness that we had at the end of the Obama years [and] make life better for the Cuban people,” he said in a recent MSNBC appearance, warning that the political cost for Biden stemming from events at the border would be worse than for lifting Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions.

This course has also been endorsed by leftist Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said he had personally urged Biden to attack the root causes of migration to the US southern border, namely the “poverty and abandonment” endemic to those countries — and which US sanctions have unquestionably played a major role in causing. This comes a month after the US envoy of the Venezuelan opposition itself, which only a year ago was demanding that Biden not waver on Trump’s policy, implored the administration to end the sanctions, lest it turn Venezuela into “another Cuba.”

Despite this diverse chorus of voices pushing for sanctions to be lifted, it’s also running into a wall. That’s because, according to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is worried about alienating Cuban-American Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who wrote a counterletter claiming, as all sanctions enthusiasts do, that the policy has nothing to do with the exodus of people from both countries.

Menendez is a hard-line supporter of Trump’s sanctions policy, and is currently under federal investigation eight years after already once being indicted on separate bribery charges. When he finds time away from potential criminal prosecution, Menendez is a full-time hawk who teams up with neocon Lindsey Graham to push legislation undermining peaceful coexistence with China and Iran. Since it relies on him to push through appointments blocked by the GOP and to pursue its wider geostrategic goals, the administration has tended to give Menendez enormous leeway in driving its own foreign policy decision-making, something that likely won’t change anytime soon.

Still, the fact that there’s any disquiet being heard at all in Washington toward the ruinous and largely pointless US overuse of sanctions — a weapon that the Biden administration has used with record frequency — is an important development. Political shifts in the halls of Congress don’t happen overnight and are usually the fruit of months and years of small, symbolic measures like this letter, adding up bit by bit to slowly shift what’s politically acceptable. This progressive challenge to a president — one who’s otherwise enjoying near-dictatorial levels of obeisance from fellow elected Democrats — is a first step, and one that couldn’t have happened without the election of progressive insurgents to Congress.

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