Vanessa Williamson (Brookings) & Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington), The Case for Taxing Billionaires Is Older Than You Think, MSNBC (Nov. 12, 2025):

The “overgrown influence” of extreme wealth, wrote Thomas Paine in 1792, was “one of the principal sources of corruption at elections.” More than 200 years later, billionaires line up behind the president at his inauguration and the wealthiest Americans exert colossal influence over U.S. politics. Our deeply oligarchic times have vindicated the warning from Paine, whose pamphlet “Common Sense” helped spark the American Revolution. Now we should consider Paine’s solution to oligarchy: a wealth tax with a top marginal rate of 100%. . . .

[In The Rights of Man,] Paine proposed an annual tax on the returns to wealth with a top marginal rate of 100%. “There ought to be a limit to property,” Paine argued, when that property was far above the amount one could earn through personal effort or could use to care for a family. “The aristocracy has screened itself too much,” he wrote, and this tax would “restore a part of the lost equilibrium.”

For more, see Vanessa Williamson’s book released on November 11, 2025, titled The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History.