Gabriel Zuckman

He's a French economist and is currently the toast of the left across the world for doing the thinking for how a new tax on billionaires might actually work.

Indeed, it's been named after him, the Zuckman tax.

His new book, We Need to Tax Billionaires, has just been published in English and has made him the man in demand with progressive leaders across the globe.

So we invited him in to the Newsagent studio to discuss his ideas, how he believes they could transform the fortunes

quite literally, of embattled governments across the world and how he thinks we must act now to prevent a new plutocracy from which even democracy might not be able to save us.

Welcome to The News Agents.

The News Agents Well, Gabriel, thanks so much for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

I just wanted to ask before we started, how does it feel to have a tax named after you?

Indeed, I think it's worth sort of breaking this down a little bit.

First of all, in the genesis of it, which you

allude to, which is the research on actually where billionaire's wealth is and then what you propose to do about it, i.e.

the tax, the eponymous tax, the Zuckman tax.

So in the sense of where, in terms of where this comes from, I mean, it seems to me a good place to start is what you say in your book, which is if all of France's billionaires were to flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow, the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificant, around 0.003%.

And that is the same throughout Europe and indeed globally.

the super-rich have not yet entered the realm of national solidarity.

So tell us about how you came to that calculation.

The richest man in the world probably at that time, Jeff Bezos, was basically declaring no income, getting taxed, nothing on his income, and technically qualified for various related benefits because his income was so low.

It's saved.

And one of the points you make in your book, which I think is a well-made one and is often missed, is that the political discourse, particularly in Britain, I suspect the same in France and elsewhere, is often a little cruder, which is perhaps the left would say, oh, the rich don't pay their taxes.