Jules van Binsbergen

speaker

478 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Jules van Binsbergen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions · Ep78 “What’s Wrong With Taxing Billionaires More?” with Joshua Rauh · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

But let's discuss first the basic principles behind the first goal, which is suppose that, and we are in no way saying that this is the right goal, but suppose that you wanted to increase government revenue and

The state of California just wanted to have more income so that they could spend more.

Is this measure, this billionaire tax, a good idea?

And I think that a good place to start for us the discussion is a concept that is well known to economists, but not maybe not to all of our listeners, which is something that's called the Laffer curve.

And so Laffer was an economist who introduced this idea and said, listen.

And are you sure that when you increase the tax rate?

That your tax revenues are going up.

Aren't you making an all else equal mistake?

And Jonathan, hiring an accountant to try to avoid the tax is only one reason why the tax might be going down.

We are going to be discussing later examples where the marginal tax rate is so high.

Suppose that I asked you, Jonathan, the marginal tax rate is ninety eight percent on the next dollar that you can make.

Can you please work a little harder so that we can take ninety-eight cents of the one dollar that you're producing?

You're gonna say, uh, for that extra work, you know what?

I'm just going to choose leisure over labor.

And therefore it's not just the accountant that we're hiring, but there are other behavioral responses that people will have to high tax rates.

The incentive to work more goes down a lot if you make the marginal tax rate too high.

So Jonathan, what do you think is the main motivation for why people want to introduce this billionaire tax?

Where does this come from, you think?

Yeah, I've heard this story now so many times in the United States, or maybe even people say this in certain European countries, rich people don't pay taxes.

But if we look at some data, Jonathan, and we ask the question which percentage of the total income taxes in the United States is paid for by, say, the top point one percent, the top one percent, the top ten percent, and the top fifty percent?

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