Gabriel Zucman

In France, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Party comes into power in 1981.

They create a wealth tax and then immediately

they change it to exempt the billionaires from the wealth tax.

And of course, they don't go on TV and say, look, we're going to exempt the billionaires and also they invent a little story.

They say that it's very important to protect business assets from the wealth tax because otherwise we are going to harm businesses.

And they define

Professional assets, that's how they call it.

And they define professional assets, you know, that exists nowhere in any economics textbook.

So they invent this notion.

And they define professional assets as owning more than 25% of the shares of a company.

So if you're really rich, you own a lot of shares in a big business, then all of that was exempted from the wealth tax.

That's what they put in the law.

But it's totally crazy.

It's like if the US was creating a wealth tax today and was exempting Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos from the wealth tax.

That's what the French socialists did in 1981.

Importantly, everybody understands that we can write the law differently, right?

So the idea behind the proposal is let's start really high in the wealth distribution.

So only people who have more than £100 million will be affected by the tax.

But in exchange for this very high threshold,

No exemption, no deduction whatsoever.