Gabriel Zucman

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485 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Gabriel Zucman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

So if we want an effective minimum tax on the super rich, the minimum has to be expressed not as a fraction of income, but as a fraction of wealth, which is much harder

So, what I'm saying is that if you have more than 100 million pounds, you should pay a minimum

each and every year equal to 2% of your wealth.

It means that if you are already paying in income tax more than 2% of your wealth, you're not affected.

You're good.

No extra tax for you.

But if you pay less than that, you will have to pay the difference to reach this minimum of 2%.

And so a couple of remarks.

First of all, why 2%?

The rate has not been chosen randomly, of course.

It's the rate that would ensure that the super rich would pay as much tax relative to their income than the average tax pays.

Basically, on average, the rate of return on wealth for those rich people is around 6% of their wealth.

So you do a little bit of arithmetic.

If you tax their wealth at 2% and they earn a return of 6% on their wealth, that's equivalent on average to an income tax of 33%, which is what the upper middle class, broadly speaking, pays in tax.

So that's 2%.

Then why 100 million?

It's because all of that is based on a recent research effort, international research effort, that has established that above 100 million, roughly speaking, the income tax vanishes.

In particular, because the super rich above that level use holding companies in quasi systematic manner to shatter their income from taxation.

So to put it differently, people who have 1 million, 5 million, even 10 million pounds in wealth.

Typically, they will pay income tax.

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