Economist on the benefits of a (modest) billionaire tax

In this Berkeley Talks episode, economist Gabriel Zucman discusses how wealth inequality and billionaire wealth has soared in recent decades, prompting the need for a global minimum tax of 2% on billionaires. 

“The key benefit of a global minimum tax on billionaires is not only that it would generate substantial revenue for governments worldwide — about $250 billion a year — but also, and maybe most importantly, that it would restore a sense of fairness,” says Zucman, a UC Berkeley summer research professor and director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality’s Summer Institute. 

Today, billionaires pay only about 0.2% of their wealth in taxes, says Zucman, because they often structure their wealth to minimize taxable income through control over corporate dividends, delaying capital gains and using holding company structures, among other methods. The 2% tax rate proposal is a modest one, he argues, and would merely ensure that billionaires, comprising about 3,000 families around the world, pay at least as high an effective tax rate as those in the middle class.

“For the first time in decades,” he continues, “billionaires would pay at least the same effective tax rate as nurses, teachers or secretaries, ending a situation where, in many countries, the very richest pay less than the middle class. It’s a modest, pragmatic reform, but it would make a big difference for our democracies and social cohesion.”

Zucman spoke at Berkeley on June 23 as part of the campus’s annual Stone Lecture series. Now a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, Zucman previously served on the Berkeley faculty for a decade, first as an assistant professor of economics and then as founding director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. He co-authored the 2019 book The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay with Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez. 

Watch a video of his lecture, followed by a Q&A.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley.

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