Gabriel Zucman

Everybody understands that if you are at that level of wealth, and we're talking about 1,000 families roughly in the UK, that you have a high ability to pay taxes.

And so you don't need any kind of exemption whatsoever.

Now, if you write things like that, it's already a huge progress relative to the past wealth taxes.

So that's number one.

The second crucial ingredient

is how do you deal with the threat of migration you know rich people always the debate boils down to okay perhaps it would be good to touch the super rich but they're going to move they're going to move to dubai to monaco and we can't do anything this is wrong it's wrong that it's not wrong that they will move surely some of them will you know those

flows tend to be exaggerated in the public debate, but it's not zero.

But what is wrong is this idea that we are powerless to curb this tax exile.

We are not powerless because any country on its own, let's take the UK, could say the following.

It could say, look,

if someone has lived for a long time in the UK, number one, and number two has become extremely rich in the UK, and now number three moves to another country, that's their right, fine, but

We, the UK, we will keep taxing that person as if he or she was still a resident of the UK for five years or 10 years, we can discuss.

And any country on its own can do that so that there would be no incentive anymore

for the super rich to move for tax reasons.

And so then you might say, well, it's impossible, it's never been done.

Well, no, that's what the US does.

The US is even more extreme than that.

The US says, if you have US citizenship and you move to another country, you have to pay taxes to the US until you die.

That's somewhat extreme, right?

Because, okay, imagine someone who was born in the U.S., has U.S.