Longtime So Cal resident Charles Carr is a nationally published journalist and playwright. His award-winning Southpaw column has appeared in college textbooks published by Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, Bedford, and others. Charles writes Southpaw for his hometown newspapers, The Times-Advocate and The Roadrunner.

Let's close the playground

We've been getting to here for decades.

I remember as a kid watching the 1987 movie Wall Street. When the financier sleezeball played by Michael Douglas uttered the now famous line, "Greed is good," this religious-schooled boy's jaw hit the floor. "Are we going to do this, now?" I thought. "Really?" The film ferried into the culture what would eventually be dubbed gangster capitalism, a supremely destructive mindset that has only become more pernicious all these years later.

A whole new normal was quickly established, transitioning from a world where the boss of your company might live a couple doors down from you - a nice house, sure, but you had the same paperboy - to now living in a gated palace safely protected from the envious masses. A world in which CEOs, who in 1970 made about 20 times what their workers made now makes, according to MarketWatch, "$17.7 million on average in 2023, more than 268 times what the median worker at those companies earned."

At this point, it's not trickle-down economics anymore; it's an aerosol mist, the faintest whiff of their $1,000 an ounce Poivre Sacré Caron cologne. If you're lucky.

It's an American disease that has become a worldwide epidemic. Oxfam, an organization which monitors worldwide hunger and injustice did the math: "The wealth of the global top 1% grew by $42 trillion over past decade... Inequality has reached obscene levels [where] the richest 1% of humanity continues to fill their pockets while the rest are left to scrap for crumbs."

It's gotten so bad the fat cats themselves have started to complain... about themselves. Forbes notes, "At least a dozen billionaires have made public statements that call for the super rich to pay more in taxes." Let's do the roll call:

    o Salesforce cofounder Marc Benioff wrote, "Increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change."

    o Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "At some level, no one deserves to have [a billion dollars]... At some level it's not fair."

    o Entrepreneur Eli Broad has said he supports some sort of wealth tax determined by a taxpayer's net worth.

    o Warren Buffet, who famously observed that he pays a lower tax rate than his own secretary, has proposed the "Buffet Rule" which would levy a minimum tax rate of 30% on people making more than a million dollars a year -- about a third of one percent of taxpayers. He has also called proposals to eliminate the estate tax "a terrible mistake."

    o Bill Gates calls himself "the biggest proponent of having the estate tax collect more money."

    o And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said he believes the rich should be taxed at the same or higher rate than the middle class and adds that he believes the Buffett Rule could be key to solving America's debt problem.

    o Even Libertarian-leaning former governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura railed, "There should not be one billionaire in America... Nobody works hard enough to earn billions of dollars."

While many Americans continue to wrestle with their strange Stockholm syndrome-like idolatry of the super wealthy, the rest of the world is taking action.

At the recent G20 world economic forum, host nation Brazil pushed the notion of increasing taxation on the super rich. The Brazilian government commissioned a study which reported that the world's billionaires pay an average of 0.3% tax on their wealth after all the loopholes and avoidance measures used by the rich are factored in. The EU Tax Observatory agrees, noting, "the super wealthy in the world's largest economies pay little if any taxes, at effective rates of just 0%-0.5%." The study called for implementing a 2% tax on global fortunes over $1 billion, even if the countries with the largest number of billionaires -- the US and China -- refused to join. "If some jurisdictions did not enact the measure," the study continued, "countries could employ exit taxes or use a 'tax collector of last resort' mechanism" -- a sort of bounty system in which one country could collect the taxes another country chose not to collect.

It's building. Just last month 19 former heads of state signed an open letter calling for heavier taxes on wealth. According to the Guardian, "Many Swiss citizens have argued that its wealthy residents have enjoyed a free ride for too long." Norway has applied a tax on wealth for many years and the UK is curbing existing tax-advantageous non-domicile tax status for wealthy foreign residents. Even right-wing governments are joining the movement to make the wealthy pay, with Italy doubling its flat tax on foreign income.

Greed -- as opposed to wealth -- is not good. It is a cancer which leeches empathy and compassion, metastasizing far beyond the individual, ruining families and communities and destroying the environment. It is time that all of us -- left, right, and center -- demand the morbidly wealthy make the painful (for them) transition to becoming merely ridiculously wealthy. Greedy people and the corporations they run must take a larger role in supporting the societies from which they have so immensely profited.

The super rich often like to call the world their playground. There must no longer be a place on it where money can hide. Every corner of the planet.

And if they don't like it, they can just go play somewhere else.