The Guardian view on global inequality: extreme wealth threatens democracy | Editorial

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani shows Britain’s Andy Burnham that confronting billionaires need not mean the end of cooperation with Donald Trump In November, Californians will vote on a one-off 5% levy on residents worth more than $1bn.

The union-backed plan could raise $100bn, more than enough to replace federal healthcare funding stripped away by Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act .

About 200 very rich people would pay.

But the referendum is becoming a test of whether extreme wealth can buy the political power to defeat a popular redistributive policy.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already spent $100m backing opposition to the tax – a fraction of the $13bn bill he could face.

Other billionaires are joining him.

Whether voters can impose costs on the super-rich once their fortunes are big enough to shape the political process is now an open question.

That alone should trouble any democracy.

It’s a long way from Mr Brin’s west coast lair of Mountain View to Andy Burnham’s Makerfield constituency.

But the prime minister should heed the call from prominent progressive academics – led by the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz – urging Britain to join a new global push to tackle inequality.

Prof Stiglitz wants help creating a new UN International Panel on Inequality (IPI).

This stems from the G20’s first-ever inequality report , which warned that the yawning gap between rich and poor was a human-made crisis corroding democracy and social cohesion while blocking efforts to tackle the climate emergency.

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