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

forms of assets are not very hard to value.

For instance, if you own a very valuable painting, there's an insurance value.

It's insured.

And so you can use that as a base for the wealth.

So first of all, you have to avoid a mistake that was done in the past by all the countries that used to have wealth taxes, which is to let people self-report.

You know, if you let people self-report on their wealth, some of them are going to report honestly, but there's also going to be sometimes the temptation to forget about some assets or to undervalue others.

And so the better way to proceed is to have the government

send a pre-populated wealth tax return based on the information that the government, HMRC in the UK, already collects.

And the government has access to a lot of data on wealth.

There's the land registry for real estate.

There is now an automatic exchange of bank information between countries.

So HMRC actually receives data on the wealth held by

Britain's in foreign banks.

There's been for a long time an automatic exchange of information between domestic financial institutions and the tax authority.

So the right way to proceed, in my view, is HMRC should use all that information

send a pre-populated return saying, okay, based on what we know, and based on the assessment that we've made of the value of the businesses that you own, we think that your wealth is X, that's a billion pounds.

And of course, taxpayers then could make corrections and amendments, and that's okay.

But the opening bid, if you want, has to be made by the tax administration.

I think it's part of the story, to be sure, the rise of tech and

In California, a lot of the wealth of billionaires corresponds to wealth that belongs to

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