Gabriel Zucman

In particular, and that's the main reason, because of the failure of the income tax to effectively tax them.

So if you want to correct this anomaly,

you need something, a minimum tax that's based on wealth.

And so that's the problem.

And with 2%, you know, it's really low, 2%.

There are many reasons why you might want to have higher tax rates than that on the super region.

Personally, I would favor much higher rates than that.

Let's be clear.

I worked with Bernie Sanders, for instance, in the US when he was running for president.

On his tax program, he was proposing rates of up to 8% on wealth for people with more than $10 billion in wealth.

You know, all of that makes a lot of sense.

But my thinking here was, okay, how can we design something that everybody should agree on?

It's just not possible to defend the notion that billionaires should be allowed to pay less tax than the rest of the population.

It's just a blatant violation of our most basic principles of equality before the law, which are, at the core,

of our democracies.

So we should all be able to agree at least on that.

That was the proposal.

And originally it was formulated in 2024 when Brazil had the presidency of the G20 and they wanted to put on the agenda of the G20 some new ideas for international cooperation.

And in 2021 there had been a minimum tax

on multinational companies that had been agreed on by 130 countries.