Gabriel Zucman

And the current situation is...

is a violation of this basic principle, which is at the heart of our democracy of equality before the law.

I try to spend so much time trying to explain how we can make it work practically.

Because I think at the level of general principles, as you said, we kind of all agree.

And the debate is always about, okay, but if we really did it, wouldn't we be shooting ourselves in the foot?

And so to make it work, the way I've approached this issue is that I've studied historical and international experience with wealth taxation.

Many countries in Europe used to have a wealth tax.

And the conclusion I reached with my colleagues is that those wealth tax, they really didn't work very well.

And by and large, this experiment has been a failure.

But you can look at that and you can say, well, we've tried wealth taxes in the past and they didn't work.

Hence, they will never work.

Or you can look at this and you can say, OK, what were the problems?

Do they have solutions and can we fix them?

And the truth, the reality is that, yes, there were problems, but we know the solutions.

They exist.

There were two problems.

One, in those past wealth taxes, the billionaires were essentially legally exempt because you always had deductions, exemptions for, you know, if you owned a lot of shares in the companies or that wealth was typically exempted from the French wealth tax, from the Spanish wealth tax and so on.

So of course, the solution is don't write the law like that.

And hence my idea of starting really high in the wealth distribution.

It's only people who have more than 100 million pounds in wealth who would be affected.