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The economist billionaires fear: this is how we get a wealth tax

Garys Economicsenglishenpublicupdated Jul 4, 2026, 14:18

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Introduction to Zucman

The host presents Gabriel Zucman as a leading economist on inequality, billionaire taxation, and practical wealth tax design, highlighting his book We Need to Tax Billionaires.
Zucman says his work focuses on inequality, taxation, the super rich, multinational tax avoidance, and fixing systems that allow extreme wealth and power to grow.
He argues billionaire wealth has surged dramatically, including a 40% increase globally over two years, creating major political and democratic consequences.

Zucman says living in the San Francisco Bay Area exposed him to extreme inequality between tech billionaires and widespread homelessness, which pushed him toward studying inequality.
Trump’s 2016 election reinforced his view that mainstream politics had failed to address rising inequality with practical and ambitious solutions.
He moved from measuring inequality toward policy work focused on how to tax billionaires effectively, using historical and international evidence.

Zucman agrees that inequality has often been marginal in academic economics, especially during the Cold War era when efficiency dominated the field.
He argues that classical economists were deeply concerned with distribution, and that inequality has gradually returned to the center of economics after the Cold War.
He credits Tony Atkinson and the British empirical social science tradition with reviving long-run measurement of income and wealth concentration.
His advice to students who want to study inequality is to do it and help expand the field from within academia.

Zucman sees public engagement as part of social science: researchers should not only establish facts but also disseminate them and propose solutions.
He says findings about tax evasion and effective tax rates are vital democratic information and should not remain confined to experts.
He rejects a technocratic approach, arguing that researchers should feed democratic debate while citizens decide through deliberation and elections.
He believes defending and explaining policy proposals is part of a researcher’s job when those proposals address documented problems.

Zucman explains that the proposal is not simply recreating France’s old wealth tax but creating a new principle: the extremely wealthy must pay an unavoidable annual minimum tax.
He proposes applying the tax to people with more than 100 million in wealth, with a floor based on wealth rather than taxable income so billionaires cannot avoid it by reporting little or no income.
He uses examples such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to argue that current tax systems legally allow billionaires to pay zero or very low income tax despite huge economic gains.
The proposed minimum is 2% of wealth, calculated to make billionaires pay roughly the same effective tax rate as the broader population, though Zucman personally supports higher rates in some cases.
The proposal was developed for Brazil’s 2024 G20 agenda and later passed France’s National Assembly in February 2025 before being blocked by the Senate.

Zucman expects wealth taxes on the super rich to spread internationally, comparing them to the emergence of progressive income taxes in the early 20th century.
He notes that the UK helped pioneer progressive income taxation with Lloyd George’s 1909 People’s Budget, followed by similar shifts in France and the United States.
He argues that wealth taxation now reflects a similar public realization that existing systems are unfair and that the rich should pay their fair share.

Zucman says the radical position is the current system, where the super rich can live in a parallel tax-free society despite wealth being socially created.
He says new research across around 10 countries shows working and middle classes often pay 40 to 50% of income in taxes, while billionaires pay around 20 to 25%.
Using the Sunday Times Rich List, he says the wealth of the richest roughly 200 UK families rose from about 5% of GDP in 1989 to about 25% recently.
He argues that extreme wealth is especially dangerous because, unlike middle-class wealth, it becomes power over media, markets, politics, and public policy.
He warns that wealth can create a feedback loop where wealth produces power, and power produces more wealth, threatening democratic equality.

Zucman says past European wealth taxes often failed because they were badly designed with exemptions and deductions that allowed the richest people to avoid them.
He argues a modern UK tax should start at a high threshold, such as more than 100 million pounds, but allow no exemptions or deductions.
He says the migration threat is manageable because countries can continue taxing extremely wealthy former residents for a period, such as 5 or 10 years, if they became rich in that country.
He points to the United States’ citizenship-based taxation as proof that countries can tax people beyond residence, though he views the US model as more extreme than needed.

Zucman rejects the claim that academics do not support wealth taxation, saying there is overwhelming support among economists and the wider public.
He cites a July 2025 Le Monde op-ed signed by seven Nobel Prize winners supporting a 2% minimum wealth tax on the super rich, including action by France alone.
He says the issue is fundamentally equality before the law: billionaires should not be able to pay less than nurses, teachers, or other ordinary workers.
His final message is that one country should lead by example, showing that a wealth tax can raise revenue and inspire others to follow.
For the UK, he estimates a 2% tax on super-rich wealth could raise about 15 billion pounds per year and argues the UK has a history of leading major tax and welfare reforms.

Students who want to study inequality should pursue it and help grow the field within academia.
A country should lead by example by implementing a tax on the super rich to demonstrate that the policy works and can raise revenue.
The UK political class should engage directly with academic evidence and experts on wealth taxation rather than dismissing the idea as unsupported.