As governments around the world seek to shrink their massive debt burdens, the call is rising for higher taxes on the wealthy, says Romain Hatchuel, managing partner of Square Advisors, a New York-based asset management firm.

"Households from the United States to Europe and Japan may soon face fiscal shocks worse than any market crash," he writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Voices around the world, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are calling for higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, Hatchuel says.

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The IMF reasons in a recent report that higher taxes on the wealthy would provide "significant revenue potential at relatively low efficiency costs."

The IMF calculates that the revenue-maximizing tax rate for the United States is 56 to 71 percent, way above the present 45 percent top rate for federal, state and local taxes combined.

Around the world, "powerful economic players are deciding that with an ever-deteriorating global fiscal outlook, conventional levels and methods of taxation will no longer suffice," Hatchuel writes.

The IMF's idea is for a one-off tax on private wealth.

"That makes weapons of mass wealth destruction — such as the IMF's one-off capital levy, Cyprus's bank deposit confiscation, or outright sovereign defaults — likelier by the day."

Some advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy see them as a way of shrinking income inequality. But income inequality, while a serious problem, isn't the main source of our economic troubles, says CNBC's Robert Frank.

"Inequality is still below where it was during the good times. And this shows that inequality may be more of a by-product of strong stock markets, rather than a cause of economic decline," he writes.

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