Gabriel Zucman
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Gabriel Zucman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The most important thing to understand is that the income tax
is just not the right tool to tax the extremely rich.
The income tax, the progressive income tax is a big revolution of the beginning of the 20th century.
A number of states started creating their income taxes and then it became federal policy in 1913 with the federal income tax.
And it's been hugely important.
It's the pillar of modern tax systems.
It is what has allowed governments to expand, to fund education, infrastructure, healthcare in part.
So it's been extremely important.
But it's an unfinished revolution.
because the ultra wealthy are still not in the system, so to speak.
And the reason for that is that when you're extremely rich, it's very easy to structure your wealth such that this wealth will not generate any income or any significant amount of taxable income.
And for instance, a few years ago, you had revelations by ProPublica on the taxes paid by U.S.
billionaires.
And you saw people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos paying very little income tax.
There's even one year when Bezos says, look, I'm so poor that I'm going to claim the child tax credit.
And he receives the child tax credit.
And there is nothing illegal in that.
It's not tax evasion.
It's the way the system works.
If you manage to look like you're poor from...
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