Gabriel Zucman

I think everybody agrees with that.

OK, so let's create a minimum tax on the super rich.

Second, how do we compute the minimum tax?

If we compute the minimum tax as a fraction of income, it doesn't work.

Remember Jeff Bezos.

The whole trick is that they managed to report no income.

Yeah.

OK.

So you need to express the minimum as a fraction of wealth, because wealth is much harder to manipulate than income.

Hence the principle of a minimum tax expressed as a fraction of wealth.

And then what's the rate that we can all agree on?

It's a rate of 2%.

Why?

Because if we ask the super rich to pay 2% of their wealth per year in personal taxes, it would ensure that they would pay as much tax

relative to their income than the average taxpayer.

So there is a legitimate debate to have about the proper degree of tax progressivity, meaning the extent to which the rich should pay more tax than the rest of the population.

It's normal for people to disagree, right?

But we should all agree that

no matter what our political views are, that the super rich shouldn't be allowed to pay less.

And so with a minimum tax based on wealth equal to 2% of wealth, we would make sure that they cannot pay less than school teachers, than nurses, and so on.