How many kilometers of track could be renovated with a tax on large fortunes? And how many public early childhood education places could be opened? Frente Amplio launched this Friday a calculator that allows simulating how much 50 large Spanish fortunes would contribute and distributing the estimated collection among health, education, housing, and railway. The tool is called 'Tax the Rich' and can be used from a mobile phone without registering or downloading anything.
The coalition led by Ada Colau thus takes another step in the "Let the rich pay" campaign, one day after presenting its tax proposals for the general elections on November 29. The aim is to bring the discussion about wealth to decisions that anyone can visualize, such as renovating the tracks used by commuter trains or expanding a public early childhood school.
From Forbes fortunes to commuter train tracks
The application includes profiles of businessmen such as Amancio Ortega, Sandra Ortega, Florentino Pérez, and Juan Roig. It allows selecting assets separately, in groups, or all at once and applying an annual rate of 1%, 2%, or 3%. The user also chooses what part of the calculated fee would be collected, with three assumptions of 50%, 75%, and 100%.
The tool starts from a combined wealth of 250,550 million euros, according to the selection made by Frente Amplio based on Forbes Spain. It uses the 2026 edition for the top ten positions and the 2025 edition for the rest. With a uniform tax of 2% and an effective collection of 75%, the result is around 3,758 million euros per year. In the 3% scenario and full collection, it would exceed 30,000 million in four years if the same assumptions were maintained.
Once the calculation is made, the simulator divides the amount into 20 cards that the user can assign to different items. In one of the examples disseminated by the coalition, 1,109 million euros would be equivalent, according to their calculations, to financing 1,365 Primary Care professionals, opening almost 15,000 public education places for zero to three-year-olds, or building 592 public homes and buying another 353 from large holders. These are alternative destinations for the same amount.
The tax that Colau takes to 29N
The electoral proposal has a different design than the calculator. Colau proposes an annual tax of 2% for net assets exceeding one million euros and 3% from 50 million euros, with a reduction in the quota for what has already been paid in Wealth and Large Fortunes. The coalition estimates that it would affect some 231,000 people, about 1% of those who file income tax returns. The 10 billion additional euros per year that Frente Amplio calculates correspond to the set of its fiscal proposals, which also include measures on banking, large companies, and housing accumulation.
Spain already has the Temporary Solidarity Tax on Large Fortunes, a state tax that complements the Wealth Tax and taxes, under the terms of the law, net assets exceeding three million euros. To calculate what additional income Colau's proposal would bring, it would be necessary to know the real tax bases, the applicable exemptions, and the amounts that would be discounted for current taxes. The application works with journalistic estimates of wealth and leaves the collection percentage to the user's choice.
"We must stop protecting large fortunes to protect people's lives," Colau has argued. With the simulator, the coalition turns this fiscal commitment into a campaign piece that can be shared. At the end, the user can download an infographic with the distribution they have chosen and sign the "Let the rich pay" campaign.
