Gabriel Zucman

And so we need to make sure that the rich pay their fair share.

And then the income tax became much more progressive over the course of the 20th century.

And my feeling is that something a bit like that will happen.

And it's starting to happen.

I think, first of all, what's truly radical is the current situation where the super rich can live in their own parallel society, tax-free, even though their wealth

is a social creation, is a collective success.

You don't become a billionaire by your own, right?

You've benefited from education, from healthcare, from all the public infrastructure that has made it possible for your businesses to thrive.

the locals that protect your properties and so on and so on.

And so, you know, wealth creation is always a social creation.

They benefit from subsidies oftentimes.

And the notion that you can become extremely rich thanks to the collaboration of millions of people and then have no duty whatsoever towards society is just totally radical.

So that's the current situation.

And that's what we need.

to fix and let me just emphasize that even though we could suspect that the super rich were not paying their fair share and you had you know revelations i mentioned you know pro publica in the us until recently there was just no hard data

It's not easy work because there's a tremendous opacity about the super rich.

There's no public official statistics about their wealth, about their income, about the taxes that they pay.

by working in partnership with tax administrations in different countries that we were able to establish the facts.

We have about 10 countries now where we see everywhere the same pattern, whether it's France, whether it's the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, everywhere.

The working class, the middle class pays a lot of tax.