According to the United Nations, “Inequality threatens long-term social and economic development, harms poverty reduction and destroys people’s sense of fulfillment and self-worth.”

In his book The Price of Inequality, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains how moneyed interests have made America the most unequal advanced industrial country while crippling growth and undermining democracy, resulting in a divided society that can’t tackle its most pressing problems.

In The Spirit Level, authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett illustrate how excessive inequality results in unhealthy societies exemplified by higher rates of violent crime, drug abuse, mental illness and other social ills.

You get the picture. Inequality is a bad thing.

One of the more egregious examples of inequality is the grossly excessive incomes of the world’s billionaires. And their excessive power. Think, for instance, about how billionaires such as Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk use their control over media to corrupt discussion of the issues of the day.

All this prompts calls to tax the rich, especially the obscenely rich, one avenue to reducing inequality while returning power to the people. According to a report by the G20, billionaires are only paying on average 0.3 percent of their wealth in taxes. Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California at Berkeley, claims the super rich pay very low effective tax rates, much lower than the middle class.

So he has made a modest proposal: a two percent global wealth tax on the uber-rich. It would affect the 3,000 wealthiest people in the world. Economists say it would unlock US $250 billion a year.

In his baseline proposal, individuals with more than $1 billion in wealth would be required to pay a minimum amount of tax annually equal to two percent of their wealth. Taxes would only have to be paid by billionaires that do not already pay two percent of their wealth in income tax. Zucman believes the system could be enforced successfully even if all countries did not adopt it.

Brazil has become a champion of the proposal and put it forward for discussion at a recent G20 meeting. Fernando Haddad, Brazil’s finance minister, pointed out that “the richest one percent own 43 percent of the world’s financial assets and emit the same amount of carbon as the poorest two-thirds of humanity.” Clearly, the tax would be eminently fair—from a climate change standpoint alone.

The proposal drew both praise and criticism. France, Spain, South Africa and several other nations voiced support while the U.S. and Germany expressed opposition.

The issue is on the OECD’s agenda and the UN Subcommittee on Wealth and Solidarity Taxes has reported on policy options for the introduction of wealth taxes and is working on a model wealth tax law.

Gaining enough support from a critical mass of countries to make a wealth tax work will be a long haul, but then so was the effort to create the 15 percent global minimum tax on multinational corporations which came into effect in January. What was achieved for multinational firms should now be achievable for the super-rich.

Movement on the multinationals’ tax was slow until the election of Joe Biden who promoted the policy. According to Zucman, “Leadership might change, but what does not change is the overwhelming popular demand everywhere for this type of policy, for fixing this big tax injustice of our time.”

Just getting the proposal on the G20 agenda was a historic step. We may be moving, even though it often seems imperceptibly, toward globalization that is fair for all of us.