Gabriel Zucman

I've experienced it firsthand in France, like the 2% minimum tax proposal.

minimalistic.

Everybody should be in favor.

86% of the population is in favor.

And the billionaires, when it came very close to passing a few months ago, they used all the media that they own and they own 85% of the private press.

They own all the economic newspapers of the country except one.

And they use it to stoke fears and to predict all sorts of catastrophes.

And more importantly, to essentially threaten

elected representatives to blackmail them, essentially saying, look, if you vote for that, they didn't say that as explicitly, but that was really the substance of the message.

If you vote for that bill, for that proposal, we will fight you with all our weapons and all our money.

Yes and yes, 100%.

So is it practical?

A lot of the work that we've done over the last few years has been to study the historical experience with wealth taxation in many countries like France, Germany used to have wealth taxes and abolished in many cases their wealth taxes.

And what's important to understand is that those wealth taxes, they really didn't work very well.

That is true.

And that's often an argument that you hear from opponents of wealth taxation.

They said, oh, it's been tried in the past and it failed.

I agree with that part of the statement.

That's correct.

They were really poorly done, but