YouSaid · the spoken record

Gabriel Zucman

lines on the record: 63
first: 2026-07-12
most recent: 2026-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That you can observe when on the margin any extra dollar that you make above 10 million, 100 million, you keep almost all of it. Well, people who are motivated by earning one extra million in income above 100 million, many of them, many of these forms of income earning processes are not very positive some. This is income that's earned at the expense of could be shareholders, could be consumers, could be workers. That's income that's earned by exerting monopoly power or that's income that's earned because you are going to bargain for yourself as a CEO, a super high compensation package that has been going to mean less money for shareholders, less money for workers. So those sky high incomes by and large, I think the historical record suggests that by and large there are zero sum for society.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not i think my reading of the historical experience is that those roosevelts type top measuring tax rates were not bad policy were a net probably a net positive because what it does is that it's not using taxation for redistribution it's not taking money from the rich to fund transfers for the poor it's it's not that it's changing the distribution of market income or pre-distribution the distribution of income before tax what i mean is that it's changing the incentives for people to try to earn extraordinarily high incomes and i think you know what it did is that it contributed to boosting wage growth for the middle class for the working class it curbed the various forms of rent extraction”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is very different. But in a situation 1950, we have trillionaires, we have booming billionaire wealth, they pay no income tax. Now the challenge is how do we fix that product?”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is not what you would favor. Because the problem with our income tax is that billionaires report no very little income and we're not going to fix that problem with 90% top marginal income tax rates. We are going to fix that problem with some kind of tax that's based on wealth. I think the main limitation of the US or also British experiment with highly progressive income and estate taxation during the 20th century is that it never tried to address that issue perhaps also because for good reasons because extreme wealth had largely disappeared after World War II and so the question of how much income tax those people would pay was not really relevant but now extreme wealth is making a combat. So we need to invent my proposal is not to say let's do what was done in the past, it was okay let's kind of repeat old recipes that's not that the situation in 2026”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think the lesson, we can study the historical experience of the US. And of course, it's difficult to know how the US economy would have evolved with the different tax policies, so what the counterfactual is. Okay, so we have to be careful. But what we can know as a fact is that when the US had this policy of quasi-confiscatory top-marginal income tax phrase for really wealthy, very wealthy people, and indeed for income tax, but also for inheritance tax with race of nearly 8%, what happened? It didn't kill growth. In fact, growth was higher back then than it is today. It had a dramatic effect on inequality. It reduced inequality a lot. That's when level of income and wealth concentrations in the US reached their historical minimum. And so a new look, like many other economists had that experience,”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends a lot on what the debate is going to be about. So if we talk more about issues like this, how do we fix our inequality problems, our tax problems, then I think the right and the far right has to offer is very weak and it's not popular and they will lose. Now, if the left is divided and is not kind of talking enough about those questions, then we talk about other things about immigration, about what have you, and the right the far right has a chance to win.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine, appalling. Most people before the law. They don't accept. It is such a fundamental dimension of what it means to live in a democracy, of what it means to live with the rule of law. The law has to be the same and the fact that those super rich people might threaten to leave or to hide assets. That shouldn't serve as an excuse for saying fine, you're free to live in your own parallel society and not contribute like the rest of the population. That's just not acceptable.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fact that the far right came out very strongly against this proposal is actually going to harm them a lot. And for some time, they tried to maintain some kind of ambiguity, saying we're not in favor, but we recognize that there are problems with the tax system. And then the debates that we had in Patrick in the fall, last year in France, forced them to clarify what they stand for. And they said, look, we think that the billionaires are untouchable. If we try to tax them, they will leave. It would be like shooting ourselves in the foot. We're not going to do that. We have to accept that there's going to be a law that's more lenient for the super rich and the powerful and harsher for the poor, for immigrants, for the rest of the population. That's their view. It's very clear. It's very clear view. But it's a view that most people”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In parliament, yes, there's a huge disconnect between the popular and democratic support and demand and what's currently being legislated.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world, frankly, because when they destroyed US aid, this implies millions of deaths, including of children of less than five years old, all around the world. So really catastrophic consequences follow us.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A high number. People think that there's been a growth miracle in the US since Reagan. No. Is equivalent to 14% of US GDP. It was 3% at the hate of the guilty days in 1900, in 1910. So these are levels of concentration that have skyrocketed, that come with enormous forms of plutocratic capture on the US federal government. We saw that when Musk had almost a cabinet position with total freedom to slash spending that he didn't like with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOS. So, look, the macroeconomic record of the US since 1980, since the Reagan experiment is not good. The main consequence that this has had has been an explosion of inequality with very worrying, in fact, dramatic catastrophe consequences for not only US democracy, but for”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create 100% tax on all incomes above $25,000. And they nearly did it. They did 94%. It's three not far from 100%. And this was the policy of the US under FDR and Truman and Eisenhower and so on. Did it destroy economic growth? No. Growth was higher in those decades that it's been since the 1980s. Did it destroy innovation? Did it destroy US capitalism? Not at all. Investment rates were higher in those decades than they've been since the 1980s. What has happened since the 1980s is they've done the opposite, right? They used to have the most progressive tax system in the world and they went early in in the opposite direction. What's been the consequence of that? Macroeconomic growth has declined very substantially. It was 2% per year on average between 1946 and 1980. It's been 1.4%.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what's interesting in the case of the US is that there's been enormous change in US tax policy over the course of the 20th century. And you can look at how this has correlated with a growth and innovation and productivity in the US. So remember that for half a 20th century, between the 1930s and the late 1970s, the top marginal income tax rate in the US on average was 78%. There was a long period of time during World War II, after World War II, when it was 90, more than 90%. There's a famous speech by Franklin Roosevelt in Congress in 1942, where he says, look, I think that no American should have an income after paying taxes of more than 25,000 dollars of the time, equivalent to $2 million today. Hence, I propose to”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but also because there's no party on the other side of the spectrum that's actually proposing to enact those things. very few parties so you know that's that's yeah that's the problem we have”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But most people and the vast majority actually want to tax billionaires. Polling that's been done everywhere in the world shows tremendous support. In France, it's like 86% of the population that favors the 2% minimum pollution.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“power, the power to influence markets, the power to influence the prevailing ideology by bank media companies, the power to buy elections, to influence policymaking and so on. And there is always a fundamental tension in democratic societies between extreme wealth on the one hand and the very possibility of a well-functioning democracy on the other hand. It's a very serious problem that all the thinkers of democracy have written about all the way back to Aristotle, to someone like Leah Yipi at the London School of Economics today. It is, in my view, probably the most important problem or challenge that we're going to face in the 21st century.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to be very clear about the fact that it's not a 2% tax on Billionaire wealth that's going to be remotely enough to reduce the concentration of wealth, enhance the concentration of power. The 2% tax, the proposal in the book, it addresses another problem. It addresses this tax injustice issue, but it's not fixing this other problem, which is in any way.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But those among the super rich who avoid taxation today. So it's the fairest and the most targeted tax that you can think of.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the explosion of extreme wealth. And the prevailing view at the time was like, okay, perhaps the billionaires don't pay a lot of tax, but there are so few in number that it doesn't really matter from a public finance perspective. And that you might have been true at the time, but today it's just not true anymore because the flip side of the explosion of the wealth of the super rich is that now you have this big tax base of 25% of GDP. And for comparison, Look, Kiwstang famously tried to get 1.5 billion pounds by scrapping fuel allowances for retirees. 1.5 billion. Here we're talking 10 times more money, 15 billion from just roughly families who pay very low tax today because it's only applying to not only those who are extremely wealthy.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't matter the tax would apply to residents, even non citizens. What matters is residence. You take the residence in the Sunday Times rich list. The base is 25% of GDP. They pay almost no income tax today. And so you apply 2% to that base and you get 2% times 25%. Tax revenue of 0.5% of GDP. That's the ballpark number. I want to emphasize that there is a margin of error for the reasons that I mentioned.5% That's about 15 billion pounds per year. So I want to be very clear that this is not enough to fix the UK's public finance problems, to invest in education, in the energy transition. It's not enough, but it's also not negligible. And I think many people are approaching those debates with a somewhat outdated view dating back to 1980s, 1990s prior.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so how much money are we talking about? So first of all, there is a great deal of opacity and the wealth of the super rich. So you have to be careful. It's difficult to have a pretty precise estimate. There's a margin of error. The estimates that we have are based on the Sunday Times magazine rich list. Pubs, they overestimate the wealth for the super rich. Pubs, they underestimate, they miss some very rich people. Let's take those numbers as given. And if you take those numbers as given, what you can calculate is that the wealth of UK residents who have more than 100 million pounds adds up in total to about 25% of GDP. So that's the tax base. 25% of GDP. You apply a 2% rate.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me answer that question because I've actually studied the UK tax law and you already have something like that in the UK law for inheritance tax. There is what is known as a tale. Which means that if you move to another country for 10 years and you die abroad for a period of 10 years, you still have to pay inheritance tax in the UK. That's already in UK law. My proposal is just to extend that logic, to also apply that logic of having a tail or a trailing tax to this minimum tax on the super rich. But the legal basis already exists in the UK tax law.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. I mean, it's a risk. It all depends on how the law is written. If the law says you can move and after you've moved, we don't tax you anymore. Then I agree with you. It's a big risk. I agree with you. But it's not my proposal. The proposal is not don't write the law like that. Add a paragraph that says if you move, we keep taxing you after you've moved. So there's no incentive to move.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The banks in all tax havens have to automatically report to HMRC on the wealth of their UK customers and the income that they earn each year. I'm not saying it works perfectly well that there is full compliance, but don't get me wrong. It's been a game changer. And we see that in the data. We see a ton of wealth, which previously was hidden, which shows up in tax returns. We see a lot of income earned abroad that shows up. We've studied that in different countries.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they going to try to hide? Their wealth. And the good news is that a lot has happened since Gordon Brown because in 2018 we've created an automatic exchange of bank information between countries. It's not very well known, but it is, in my view, the most important advance in international economic cooperation of the last two decades. Before that, there was a complete bank secrecy in Switzerland and other places, very easy for rich people to hide their wealth, rampant tax evasion, a huge problem. Since 2018,”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you are concerned about something else, not rich people moving abroad, rich people moving some of their wealth to a foreign country like the Cayman Islands. And to be very clear, if there was a wealth tax on the super rich, they're worldwide assets would be taxable, meaning whether the wealth is held in the UK or in a Swiss bank or in the Cayman Islands makes no difference. You have to pay the taps. But now there's a question of enforcement.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a basic question of equality before the law. The most conservative interpretation that you can make of the principle of equality before the tax law is that wealthier people shouldn't be allowed to pay less taps related to their income than the rest of the world. Okay, listen.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me just finish to this is very important question. So what are we trying to fix? It is this regressivity problem that I'm trying to fix. So it's great”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the money stays in the holding company, you don't have income tax to pay. There's a consequence for that because this is really important. What problem are we trying to solve? The consequence of that is that if you look at how much, what's the effective tax rate of the working class, all tax included, VAT, payroll taxes, everything is going to be depending on the country, around 30, 40, 50 percent of their income. For the middle class, the effective tax rate or tax included increases a little bit. For the upper middle class, it increases a little bit. And then for billionaires, it collapses. It collapses 25% in France to less than 0.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The individual, yes, which was one of the largest fortunes of the time. And so what they found out is that there was a systematic use of personal holding companies to avoid the individual income tax. But that was during the New Deal. And the Americans at the time, they said, that's not okay. That's not how the income tax should work. And so they created what is known as the personal holding company tax, which is a tax specifically on holding companies to discourage people from doing this type of tax avoidance. And so ever since 1937 in the US, the US billionaires, they've not been able to do this kind of tax avoidance. They have found other ways. But in the UK, in France, in all other countries where we've had studies, this problem that the US fixed in 1937 still exists today. You put your wealth in a holding company and boom, as long as...”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same in France, it's the same all across the EU. It's the same everywhere with just one exception, which is the US, which had those debates in the 1930s when in 1933 the New York Times revealed that JP Morgan had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932 for the outrage, there was an inquiry.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a holding company receives dividend income from a business that it owns, then it's not going to pay tax on that dividend income.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not the base, that's not the The problem in all countries, including the UK, Is that the super rich find ways to report very little or sometimes no income? So the problem is not the rate that you apply to that income. The problem is that they report no of very little income. And how do they do that? It's because they put their wealth, which mostly corresponds to shares in companies, into holding companies, personal holding corporations. And those holding companies earn income, primarily dividends or capital gains, free from the individual income tax. They don't pay income tax on that income.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that's another question. So what is the problem we are trying to solve? It's the problem that has come into light very recently when several dozen researchers have been working in partnership with tax administrations in different countries to establish how much tax the super rich pay and help us this compare to the rest of the population.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's for those super rich individuals that the rise of inequality has been the most striking. Wealth inequality hasn't increased in the UK, but the wealth of billionaires has exploded. Let me just mention one number. You look at the Sunday Times rich list. In 1989, the first year of the ranking, the 200 wealthiest families in the UK owned wealth equivalent to 5% of the UK's GDP, meaning if they had spent their wealth, they could have bought the equivalent of 5% of all the goods and services produced in a given year in the UK. Today, the number is 20%. So you have 200 families who could buy if they spent all their money or their wealth. They could buy a fifth of everything that's produced in a given year in the UK.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particular because the super rich above that level use holding companies in quasi-systematic manner to shelter their income from taxation. So to print differently, people who have one million, 5 million, you know, 10 million pounds in wealth, typically they will pay income tax and typically the amount of personal tax that they pay right into their wealth is more than 2%. So for them, no, you could lower the threshold, but it wouldn't make any difference, right? Because they are already above 2%. It's really for the super rich that there is a need to create this floor because they avoid the income tax today. And let me just finish by mentioning that.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, if on average the rate of return on wealth for those rich people is around 6% of their wealth, so you do a little bit of arithmetic. If you test their wealth at 2% and they earn a return of 6% on their wealth, that's equivalent on average to an income tax of 33%, which is what the upper middle class, broadly speaking, pays in tax. So that's 2%. Then why 100 million? It's because all of that is based on... Recent research effort, international research effort, that has established that above 100 million, roughly speaking, the income tax vanishes.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying is that if you have more than 100 million pounds, Should pay a minimum And every year equal to 2% of your wealth. It means that if you are already paying in income tax more than 2% of your wealth Not affected, you're good, no extra tax for you. But if you pay less than that, you will have to pay the difference to reach this minimum of 2%. And so a couple of remarks. First of all, why 2%? right has not been chosen randomly of course it's the rate that would ensure that the super rich would pay as much tax related to their income than the average tax”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we express the minimum tax as a fraction of income, it does not work because the whole problem is that those super rich individuals define ways to report very little income, sometimes no income. Jeff Bezos paid himself no wage as C of Amazon, Amazon didn't distribute any dividends, he didn't sell any shares, so he didn't realize any capital gains. So his taxable income was indeed very low. But his true ability to pay taxes is, of course, very high. So if we want an effective minimum tax on the super rich, the minimum has to be expressed not as a fraction of income, but as a fraction of wealth, which is much harder.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. So, first of all, the proposal, just to make sure everybody understands. To create minimum tax for people who have more than 100 million pounds or dollars or euros in wealth so if you have more than 100 million pounds you should be paying a minimum amount of tax each and every year that's the basic proposal Mentioned the case of Jet Bezos. Today we have super rich people who pay zero. I think all of us, we agree that it's not acceptable. sure but almost everybody on that planet agrees that if you are extremely wealthy you should pay a minimum amount of tax each year Number one. Number two is, okay, if we agree, let's create a principle. And now how do we make it effective?”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They introduced a progressive income tax in the UK, the famous People's Budget of 1909, in France in 1914, in the US in 1913, and then the income tax became very progressive during the course of the 20th century. There was a lot of experimentation. But what I mean is that it was a huge political battle, the people's budget, the creation of progressive income tax. These are always complicated battles, but at the end of the day, the forces of democracy prevailed. And even though at the beginning of the 20th century, you had many people predicting all sorts of disasters if we were to ever have a provisional income tax. One century after that, everybody recognizes that by and large, it's a big success, except, and I just end with that, except that the billionaires have not yet Enter into the system. They are mostly not paying.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there is because there has been in the past, if you look at the creation of the progressive income tax. It didn't involve any kind of international agreement. It's different countries at roughly the same time at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century that said, look, we're going to do things differently. For centuries, we've had very unfair tax systems, mostly based on consumption or flood income tax rates.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, any country can say first, we're going to tie that billionaires, and second, if they move, we'll keep taxing them period. We don't need China or the US to agree to any of that. Any country unilaterally on its own can decide to do it. And so then the question is, okay, is there ever going to be the political will in any country, whether it's France or the UK, to actually do that alone?”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need an international agreement to make it work. Any country on its own can say first, we are going to tax our billionaires if they pay too little tax today. Because my proposal is not just a straight wealth tax that comes in addition to whatever you pay.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other countries do, including the UK, is the opposite extreme in some sense, or in France. What we do is we say, okay, someone who has spent all their life in the UK and now decide to move abroad, then immediately the UK stops taxing that person. I think that's not reasonable. And my proposal is to strike a kind of middle ground where if you've lived for a long time in the UK and you became very rich in the UK and now you move to another country, then the UK keeps taxing you for a number of years, perhaps not until you die, like in the US, but let's say for 10 years.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As on mobility, it's an issue that needs to be taken seriously. But what's really important to understand is that tax competition is not a law of nature, like gravity. Sometimes people think that you tax billionaires in the UK and they move to Dubai. And it's like a law of nature. It's not like that. It's a policy choice. It's something that we can choose to accept or that we can choose to fight. So for instance, the way it works in the US is that if you have US citizenship, you have to pay taxes to the US no matter where you live until you die. You can move to Dubai. It makes no difference. You still have to file tax return and pay income tax in the US. That's one model. So there's no incentive to move abroad for tax reasons.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you're higher education in public infrastructure, in healthcare, in all these core engines of economic growth, this is how the UK and France and the US have become prosperous countries. It's because they've chosen over the course of the 20th century to make those massive public investments which have lifted productivity by a factor of 10.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sentimillionaire. It's just such an unlikely event. We're talking about a 0.0001% chance that you are going to have such success that nobody age 20, 25 thinks about this. It's just not relevant. And we're talking also about in the case of the California billionaire tax, a 5% one-off tax on their wealth, which the wealth of billionaires have been multiplied by a factor of 30 over the last 30 years. So we're talking about really low tax rates for people who are extremely wealthy. It's not going to discourage anyone from innovating, from creating a startup. What really matters to encourage, to foster innovation is not to guarantee a 0% tax rate on billionaires, but it's to invest in education.”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“somebody's not going to talk okay so let's talk about these these two issues which which is one would attacks on wealth uh discourage people from innovating from becoming entrepreneurs and second this issue of international mobility so on the first issue i've spent 10 years in california i was in the faculty at berkeley i've taught literally thousands of students who then went launch a business work in tech and so on and i've defended lots of projects for billionaire taxation including in the us and not once have i ever had a student come to my office and tell me oh look professor i'm very excited about the prospect of creating my company i want to become an entrepreneur but i'm really worried about the amount of tax that i would have to pay if i become a billionaire”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decided based on individual trajectories or merits of the individual and individuals involved so you have good people among billionaires you have less good people and it just doesn't matter at all”
2026-07-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source