Gabriel Zucman

speaker

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

We have...

trillionaires, we have booming billionaire wealth, they pay no income tax, now the challenge is how do we fix that product?

You know, why not?

I think my...

reading of the historical experience is that those Roosevelt-type top marginal income tax rates were not bad policy, were a net, probably a net positive, because what it does is that it's not

using taxation for redistribution.

It's not taking money from the rich to fund transfers for the poor.

It's not that.

It's changing the distribution of market income or pre-distribution, the distribution of income before tax.

What I mean is that it's changing the incentives for people to try to earn extraordinarily high incomes.

And I think, you know, what it did is that it contributed to boosting wage growth for the middle class, for the working class.

It curbed the various forms of rent extraction that you can observe when on the margin, any extra dollar that you make above $10 million, $100 million, you keep almost all of it.

Well, okay, people who are motivated by earning one extra million in income above $100 million,

Many of these forms of income earning processes, they are not very positive.

This is income that's earned at the expense of, could be shareholders, could be consumers, could be workers.

That's income that's earned by exerting monopoly power, or that's income that's earned because you are going to bargain for yourself as a CEO, a super high compensation package that has been to mean less money for shareholders, less money for workers.

So those sky-high incomes, by and large, I think the historical record suggests that by and large they are zero-sum for society.

There is a fundamental injustice in our contemporary tax systems.

This injustice is that billionaires do not pay taxes on their income.

This is a violation of the fundamental principle of equality before the law.

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