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

And typically, the amount of personal tax that they pay relative to their wealth is more than 2%.

So for them, you could lower the threshold, but it wouldn't make any difference because they are already above 2%.

It's really for the super rich that there is a need to create this floor because they avoid the income tax today.

And let me just finish by mentioning that

It's for those super rich individuals that the rise of inequality has been the most striking.

Wealth inequality has increased in the UK, but the wealth of billionaires has exploded.

Let me just mention one number.

You look at the Sunday Times rich list.

In 1989, the first year of the ranking,

The 200 wealthiest families in the UK owned wealth equivalent to 5% of the UK's GDP.

Meaning if they had spent their wealth, they could have bought the equivalent of 5% of all the goods and services produced in a given year in the UK.

Today, the number is 20%.

So you have 200 families who could buy, if they spent all their money, all their wealth, they could buy a fifth of everything that's produced in a given year in the UK.

OK, that's a lot of questions.

So what is the problem we are trying to solve?

It's the problem that has come into light very recently when several thousand researchers have been working in partnership with tax administrations in different countries to establish how much tax the super rich pay and how does this compare to the rest of the population.

No, that's not the problem.

The problem in all countries, including the UK,

is that the super rich find ways to report very little or sometimes no income.

So the problem is not the rate that you apply to that income.

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