How billionaires get away with paying less tax than you
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a Global Player original podcast.
The minimum tax for the super rich has to be expressed as a fraction of their wealth.
The tax problem makes the problem worse because while the rest of us are paying large amounts of taxes or large proportion of our taxes in the income, these people are not paying much or if anything. This is not to say that we can fix all the problems of the world just with taxing billionaires. If all of France is billionaires,
Why do billionaires pay less tax than the average citizen?
was to flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow, the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificant.
Finding question of the 21st century, meaning this battle between oligarchic forces on the one hand and democratic forces on the other hand.
We need to tax the billionaires. You hear it all the time. Around the world, the populist left, others too, argue there are two economic worlds, them and us. Not just the rich, but the super, super rich. The haves and the have-yots. There can be no doubt in some ways that we are living in a new gilded age where the billionaires live on an almost different political and economic plane. A private jet, no doubt. Here's a stat. The 2024 UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report found that global billionaire wealth rose from about 6.3 trillion in 2015 to... to $14 trillion in 2024, an increase of roughly 121% in less than a decade. And it is wealth which begets wealth, to such an extent that no one else can ever hope to catch up.
Now, the left often talks the talk on wealth taxes. We've heard it from West Streeting and Andy Burnham just this week. Governments, though, have a patchy record of carrying them out. Where they've been tried, they've largely failed. So enter Gabriel Zuckman. He's a French economist and is currently the toast of the left across the world for doing the thinking for how a new tax on billionaires might actually work. Indeed, it's been named after him, the Zuckman tax. His new book, We Need to Tax Billionaires, has just been published in English and has made him the man in demand with progressive leaders across the globe. So we invited him in to the Newsagent studio to discuss his ideas, how he believes they could transform the fortunes
quite literally, of embattled governments across the world and how he thinks we must act now to prevent a new plutocracy from which even democracy might not be able to save us. Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents Well, Gabriel, thanks so much for coming in. Thanks for having me. I just wanted to ask before we started, how does it feel to have a tax named after you?
Yeah, well, it was not a childhood dream, but I think one advantage of this is that it forces everybody to understand that it's a new proposal. It's not about recreating the wealth taxes of the past, which have existed in many European countries and which didn't work very well. You know, that's some of the story that I said, that I explained in the book, that we need to do a better job at taxing the ultra-wealthy. And so that's one thing. But the negative aspect, and I didn't seek this, you know, it's not my invention, you know, this name, but the more negative aspect is that, you know, it's a collective... research effort. And it's a collective project, you know, and so it shouldn't be attached to just one name.
What's really important is all the work that has been done by dozens of researchers in many countries over the last few years to establish the facts, to dissipate the opacity that exists today about the taxes that the billionaires pay. And that's the story I tell in the book.
Indeed, I think it's worth sort of breaking this down a little bit. First of all, in the genesis of it, which you allude to, which is the research on actually where billionaire's wealth is and then what you propose to do about it, i.e. the tax, the eponymous tax, the Zuckman tax. So in the sense of where, in terms of where this comes from, I mean, it seems to me a good place to start is what you say in your book, which is if all of France's billionaires were to flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow, the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificant, around 0.003%.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:28
2
Why do billionaires pay less tax than the average citizen?
0:28–7:14
3
How has billionaire wealth changed over the years?
7:14–9:24
4
Why have past wealth taxes failed in practice?
9:24–10:11
5
What is the Zuckman Tax and how does it propose to work?
10:11–40:29