How billionaires get away with paying less tax than you

This is a global player, original podcast. The minimum tax follow super-arriage 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 portion 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 the France's billionaires would flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow, the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificant. The hanging question of the 21st century, meaning this battle between early-garlic forces under one hand and democratic forces under 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 world rose from about 6.3 trillion in 2015 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 Westreeding 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 New's age and studio to discuss his ideas how he believes they could transform the fortunes quite literally of imbattled 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 New's Agents. The New's Agents. Okay, well, thanks so much for coming in. Thank you. 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. Much if you want. One advantage of this is that it forces everybody to understand that it's a new proposal. You know, 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-worthy. And so that's one thing, but the negative aspect, and I didn't seek this. You know, it's not my invention in this name, but the more negative aspect is that, you know, it's a collective research effort. 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 billionaires wealth is, and then what you propose to do about it, either tax, the eponymous tax, the Zupman tax. So, in terms of where this comes from, I mean, seems to me a good place to start is what you say in your book, which is, if all the French is billionaires, which have flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow, the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificance around 0.003%. And that is the same throughout Europe, and indeed globally, the super rich have not yet entered the realm of national solidarity. So tell us about how you came to that calculation. So what we did, so part of the starting point is that there's no official public statistics about the wealth of billionaires, their income or the taxes that we pay, that they pay. And so what we did over the last few years is to partner with tax administrations in different countries to dissipate this opacity and to link businesses to their owners and to compute the true income of the super rich and the total amount of tax that they pay directly personally and indirectly through the businesses that they own. And what we realized, and we have studies now for about 10 countries, is that everywhere the income tax, the personal income tax, which in principle is supposed to be the pillar of tax progressivity, of tax justice. It's supposed to be the way that we make the rich pay that fair share. The income tax vanishes for the extremely wealthy. And that's because they don't pay income tax, almost no income tax, very little. And that's because of several problems, but the most important one is the systematic use of personal holding companies. It's not very well known form of tax avoidance, but it's widespread. In fact, even systematic among the very rich. Just explain more. And so the way it works is that, no, for the very rich, for the billionaires, most of their income, or most all of their income, is the profits of the businesses that they own. Most of their wealth, or most all of their wealth, corresponds to shares in companies. And so what they do is that they put their wealth, they put those shares into holding companies, which are a bit like share corporations. They don't have any substance. So it's all paper games, but once you've put your wealth in a holding company, it's going to be the holding company that's going to earn income. It's going to earn dividends. And that's going to be tax free. You know, because the dividends are earned on paper, not by a person, an individual, they're not subject to the individual income tax. And at the holding level, there's also no of very little tax that's collected. And so that's how you can earn billions in income free from income taxation. And more broadly, the problem is that when you're extremely wealthy, it's very easy to structure your wealth. It could be through holding companies, but sometimes it can involve trusts or other arrangements. So as to ensure that your wealth is not going to generate any significant amount of taxable income. Let me give perhaps just one illustration, which is quite striking. So a few years ago, you had revelations by the US media, ProPublica, and the taxes paid by US billionaires. And you saw people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk reporting very little income, paying very little income tax. In one year, Jeff Bezos says, "Oh look, I'm so poor that I'm going to claim family benefits." And he receives a child tax credit. He receives a check from the IRS and pays no income tax. Bezos, too. Bezos, one of the wealthiest person in the world. And don't get me wrong, there's nothing illegal in that. No, it's not fraud, it's not tax evasion, it's the way the system works. If you find ways to reduce your taxable income to zero, you're not going to pay income tax and you're going to be viewed as poor by the tax system. So the budget is. The rest of the world, probably, of that time, Jeff Bezos was basically declaring no income. Exactly. Getting taxed nothing on his income, and technically qualified for various relate benefits because his income was so low. Exactly, and so how did he do it? As CEO of Amazon, he didn't pay himself a wage. As the controlling shareholder of Amazon, he instructed the company not to pay out dividends. And he didn't sell shares, and so he didn't realize any capital gains. And so his taxable income was indeed very low, even though his true economic income, which is his share of Amazon's profit is really high. Amazon makes billions in profits today. And his wealth, of course, is extremely high, is one of the wealthiest person in the world. So where was he putting his income? So the income just remains in the company. In the company? No, no. In his case, there's not even a holding company involved. Everything remained in Amazon, saved, reinvested, contributing to the appreciation of the share price of Amazon. But there's just an illustration of how, if you're extremely wealthy, you can find ways to not have to report any significant amount of taxable. And one of the points you make in your book, which I think is a well-made one, and there's often missed, is that the political discourse, particularly in Britain, I suspect the same in France. and elsewhere is often a little cruder, which is perhaps the left would say, "Oh, the rich don't pay their taxes." Whereas in actual fact, as you show, actually most of the rich in terms of the top income desks, I'll say, do pay a high level of tax. They pay a lot of tax, much as the rest of the income distribution do. What we're talking about here or what you're talking about here is not say the top 10%, or that's not even the top 1%. We're talking about the top 0.0 once. Yes, absolutely. This is not to say that we can fix all the problems of the world just with taxing billionaires, but two things. One is that there is an anomaly in our tax systems. The anomaly is not that the upper middle class or relatively well-paid professionals don't pay taxes. They do pay taxes. The anomaly is that the super rich think people who have more than 100 million pounds in wealth, they pay very little. They leave outside of society, in a kind of parallel society, free of tax. For a long time, you could ignore the problem. Many people suspected that this was true, but they said, "Well, there are so few in number those super rich that doesn't really matter from a government revenue perspective. It doesn't matter for budgets." I was going to ask you how many people we talk about. We're talking about a few people, and I'm going to give you the numbers, but the point is that their wealth has exploded. Now it's really significant. Even if you don't care about inequality, even if you care only about the budget, the issue of how much tax those super rich pay or don't pay is very important. So in the UK, you have perhaps around 1,000 households who have more than 100 million pounds in wealth, that order of magnitude, in 1989. The first year of the Sunday Times magazine Rich List, if you look at the top 200 wealthiest families, which is the top 0.001% wealthiest families in the UK, their wealth was equivalent to 5% of the UK's GDP. Meaning if they had spent all of their wealth, they could have bought 5% of all the goods and services producing the UK that year. Now if you take that same group of the population, the 200 wealthiest families in the UK, they have, each of them has more than 700 million pounds in wealth. Today, collectively, they own the equivalent of 25% of GDP. One quarter is the entire world. One quarter, if they spent all their wealth, they could buy a quarter of everything that's produced in a given year in the UK. The style of the country. You know, this rise of billionaire wealth has been one of the most striking, and I think important evolutions of the world economy of the last decades. With an acceleration since the financial crisis of 2008-09, and an acceleration of the acceleration of the last couple of years, if you take a global perspective. As you put it in your book, I think this is something that is not talked about enough. Two things have added to that. One is we see massive programs of quantitative easing, money printing effectively for central banks around the world after 2008. Inflates asset prices, these people get richer. As you say, the tax problem makes the problem worse, because while the rest of us are paying large amounts of taxes or large portion of our taxes in the income, these people are not paying much or if anything in terms of taxation on their income. That allows them to accumulate more wealth and more wealth and it's a self-perpetuating problem. Yes, well put and indeed, this is the deep anomaly in our tax systems today, which is that we have an income tax, but the income tax is, for most of the population, is on all of their income, like you and I, we earn a wage, we have to pay income tax, and then with whatever remains, after we've consumed, we can save and we can add to our wealth. But for the super rich, the income tax does not work like that. They don't have an income tax. They have just a consumption tax. So the very, the earning income, they consume a tiny fraction of it and they're going to pay taxes on that, but most of the rest, they're going to save it and they can save it tax-free. And so because their income can almost entirely be saved tax-free, mechanically their wealth is growing much faster than the wealth of everybody else. The wealth of billionaires has been growing 10% per year on average over the last decades, as opposed to 4% for the average person. And so why is that a problem? So fundamentally it's a problem because extreme wealth is always an extreme power. It's always the power to influence markets by buying competitors, for instance, is the power to influence the prevailing ideology by buying media companies, newspapers, TV channels, radio stations, is the power to influence policy making, to buy elections and so on. And so there's 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. And look, everybody since Aristotle, everybody who has written about democracy has highlighted this tension. We forgot a little bit about it after World War II when extreme wealth was at a historically low level. It had not completely disappeared, but it was low. And then there's been this explosion over the last decade, it was again an acceleration in recent years. And now this fundamental tension is making a comeback and is going to be, in my view, the defining problem, the defining question of the 21st century. But it feels a lot better. It feels a lot better between early-garlic forces on the one hand and democratic forces on the other hand. Well, it feels a lot more, doesn't it? Like the world, of say the 1890s or the 1910s, sort of Gilded Age rather than the post-war years as you've alluded to. When it's your say as a result of the Second World War and these massive, you know, welfare states, which come along in redistributive states, you know, you have extreme wealth which is, you know, relatively curtailed. But the early late 19th, 20th century world is more similar to the world. Yes, except that in some sense, especially if you look at a country like the US, today's situation is already far worse than during the Gilded Age. So let's look at the US. So you can do one very simple computation which is look at really the super top, the oligarchs, you know, the top 20 wealthiest people in the US today, so top 0.001% of the population. So that would be the four wealthiest households in 1910. And look at how much wealth they owned, that group of the population at the peak of the Gilded Age, like right before WW1. They owned in wealth the equivalent of 4% of US GDP. Today they own the equivalent of 12% of US GDP. With like the curve is vertical over the last few years. Like, you know, their wealth is richly skyrocketing and everybody has seen the very concrete consequences that this has when Elon Musk got a cabinet position at the beginning of the second Trump administration. And you know, we stood all power to slash government funding that he didn't like. You know, how extreme wealth very quickly can transform and become an extreme, pretty cool power. Well, I mean, you say in the books of the quote that really struck me on this theme, which said nobody knows the exact concentration of wealth, which the kind of plutocratic collapse we have seen in history becomes inevitable. The point of no return is anyone's guess. What do you mean by that the point of no return? Well, the point past which the concentration of wealth becomes a search that, you know, our democracy institutions collapse and they're unable to reverse it. And it becomes very, very hard to reverse it. And look, I am a big believer in the power of democratic forces. So I do think that, you know, sometimes you look at the current situation and you think it's hopeless. The pioneers have so much power that we cannot change anything and it's already over. And I absolutely don't view things like that. But what I want to emphasize is just, you know, the the the danger of allowing such an extreme concentration of wealth. Just a couple of days ago in the US again, though, well, something really crazy, you know, the president Trump sued had sued the IRS, the tax administration, because his tax return had leaked a few years ago. And so he was asking 10 billion dollars from the IRS, you know, president that controls the IRS. And so they settled on a deal where he's not getting 10 billion dollars, but there is a commitment by the IRS to never audit Trump's tax return and to never audit the tax returns of the Trump family. You know, you see that it's past corruption is totally, you know, plutocratic capture of the most essential institutions of the country. Well, let me put two counter-agrements to you that I know you're familiar with. One is, and you've already alluded to it. We are talking by your own admission of a very small, very small number of people. Yes, they have a great deal of concentrated wealth, but they are a small number of people. We're going to get onto the details of what you're proposing to do about it. So I don't want to sort of go that far ahead, but just on the principle of it, even if you were to tax them at the sort of levels that we're talking about, we didn't make that much difference. Right. Right. Make that much difference to state's fiscal situation, the UK's fiscal situation, France's fiscal situation. Oh, yes. Well, yes, it first really depends on the rate, of course, at which you tax them, but even if you tax them now at a relative amount of tax rate, so let's say 2% tax on their wealth, the arithmetic is very simple. When, let's get back to the UK, you know, when the top 200 families own the equivalent of 5% of GDP in wealth, if you tax that wealth at 2%, you get 0.1% of GDP in additional tax revenue. So that was in 1990s. You could say, well, that's not much, no, why bother? Now, when they own 25% of GDP, you tax that at 2%, you get 0.5% of GDP. 0.5% of GDP, that's 15 billion pounds per year in additional tax revenue from just 200 families. I don't think you can neglect that. Perhaps just to give one example. Well, the government deficit is around 70 billion. Yes. So 15 billion, it's not nothing as part of that. So that I agree is really not enough to fix the public finance problems of the UK. And it's not enough for all the investments that we need to make, in education, in healthcare and so on. But it also is a serious amount of money. Like, you know, Kierstommer famously wanted to get rid of winter fuel allowances for retirees, and he was hoping to get 1.5 billion pounds from that. And you can get 10 times more by just asking billionaires whose wealth is growing 10% per year to just pay 2%. So now, even if you don't care about inequality, even if you take a pure public finance perspective on these issues, you have to care about billionaires tax. And what about the idea, which again is put forward, that it is, in fact, I mean, you've identified it with Bezos, which is that, well, if these people aren't getting income, if their wealth is sitting in these companies, which is going to productive purposes, which is going on new capital, new capital and employing people and so on, well, then why should there be tax? Then they should simply be taxed in the way that would be normal. If they're not deriding income from it in a traditional sense, then why and how should there be tax? Well, except that middle class people are safe, they save money and their saving is also going to earn investments. But they have to pay taxes before they can save. So why should the saving of the middle class be taxed, and the saving of billionaires be untaxed? No, that's not consistent. So there's two consistent ways to do things. Either you say, well, we have an income tax for everybody, including the billionaires, and that's not the case today. And so we need to fix the system. Or we just have a consumption tax, to let the billionaires just have a consumption tax. But in that case, everybody should just have a consumption tax. And so you should abolish the income tax and just have a big VAT. And that's the standard conservative view. And that's consistent. But it's the current situation, which is, you know, for the super rich, you just tax consumption, which is a tiny fraction of their income. And for the rest of the population, you tax order of their income. It's this situation, which is just not acceptable, not logical. I was also very struck by your argument, which I think is a compelling one, which is to of course look at income tax in historical perspective, because we think of income tax as being just such a staple of life. But of course, it's quite a modern innovation. You know, most states late 19th, early 20th century, it becomes permanent. Your view is, is that in effect that revolution in how states fund themselves has been or is incomplete, because it has not extended to the super rich. So first of all, it's important to realize how the invention of progressive income taxation was an important revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, in many countries. So for centuries, countries had been taxing essentially consumption. So very unfair, a higher burden for the poor than for the rich. Then at some point in the 19th century, they introduced some low flat income tax rates, like in the UK in 1843, 2% tax for everybody, no matter whether you're very rich or poor. And then it's it's this revolution where we are saying collective, okay, now the tax rate should be higher for for higher income earners. In 1909, it's the famous people's budget of Lloyd George in 1909, that introduces a super tax of 2.5% for the 10,000 wealthiest people in the UK. So that's why the House of Lords famously didn't like that very much. That's not actually exactly exactly the House of Lords vetoed it and you know, it was a big constitutional crisis and then you had parliament alky 1911 removing the veto power of the House of Lords. But it was a major revolution because then, okay, initially the progressive income tax, you know, 2.5, 4.5% for the very rich, 2% for the rest of the population, not very ambitious. But then income tax became really very progressive with rates of nearly 100% marginal tax rates for the super rich after World War II. Be sales famously rose about it in one of their songs. Yes. And what's important is that the progressive income tax was really well allowed the UK and other countries to build their modern tax system. And with the modern tax system, what it enabled is the development of the social state, the welfare state, education for all healthcare, public infrastructure, which has been the key endgine of economic growth during the 20th century. It's been the main reason why we are 10 times more productive today than a century ago. So, you know, a big revolution, but this revolution remains incomplete in the sense that the ultra-worthy are still not yet into the system. So that's the problem. When we come back, we'll be talking to Gabriel about what he'd like to see us do about it. From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists. Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. So just as I take responsibility for the results, I also take responsibility for delivering the change that we promise. For a stronger and fairer Britain, that we must build. Now, he's still toast, he's just wasting our time now. The words of two in a growing list of labour MPs whose patience with the Prime Minister has run dry. Is there anything he said or can say to make you want him to stay? Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app. LBC leading Britain's conversation. So Gabriel, I've already mentioned you have an eponymous tax, the Zuckman tax. What is your proposal? Because to deal with this problem of the super-wealthy taxation, because of course, wealth taxes are something that is on the lips of lots of central left or left-wing politicians. It's often said that they don't work and to be fair, there is not a particularly glorious history of it where they've been introduced, including in France. So how would it be different? The proposal is it's very simple in many ways. You might say, well, it's really crazy that it's not already written in our laws. The proposal is to say that extreme wealth has to come with unavoidable duties towards society. So there has to be a minimum amount of tax that you have to pay each and every year if you're past some level of wealth. That's a hundred million pounds. I think everybody on this planet, frankly, agrees with that. Agrees with the idea that there's no right for billionaires to pay zero. Okay, sure. So that has to be a minimum. So now a question, how do you compute the minimum? If you compute the minimum tax as a fraction of income, it doesn't work. Get back to the Bezos example. His taxable income was zero. So, you know, 25% let's say zero is three zero, no progress. So to be effective, the minimum tax for the super-erage has to be expressed as a fraction of their wealth. And if you choose a tax rate of 2%, you would ensure that the super-erage would pay as much tax or as if to their income as the rest of the population. No less, no, but no more. So this is kind of the most consensual proposal you can make. 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 relative to their income than the rest of the population. And it's normal for people to disagree and more conservative people want less progressivity, more left-wing people want more progressivity. Fine, we will always disagree and that's okay. But I think nobody should accept and nobody fundamentally accepts the possibility that the super-erage should be allowed to pay less than the rest of the population. That's the current situation today. And that's what the minimum tax of 2% of wealth would address, meaning if you have more than 100 million and you already pay a fair amount of tax, the equivalent of 2% of your wealth in income tax, for instance, then you wouldn't have anything extra to pay. But if you pay less than 2%, so if you really pay less than school teachers and retirees and nurses, then you would have to pay a bit more to reach this minimum floor of 2%. So it's just a feature that is the fairest and most targeted tax that you can imagine, because it's not only under super rich, but on those among the super rich who largely avoid taxation. And why do you think that would be more successful than the examples of wealth taxes which have been introduced historically, which some of what better than others, but generally don't have that glorious record? Oh, I agree that they don't have a glorious record. And it's fact that go beyond that, I think by and large, they were big failures. And I tell the story in the book, like French wealth tax, which was created in 1981, by the Socialist Party in power, and immediately the exempted the super rich from the wealth tax. They said, "Okay, if someone owns more than 25% of the shares of a company, so if you're really big, then all that wealth is going to be exempted from the wealth tax." And that was Mitterro, who was a such displeasured. 1982. And so the consequences that the effective wealth tax rate for French billionaires was 0.005%. A total, pretty cool, and intellectual failure. Now, there are two ways to look at that international and historical experience. You can say, "Okay, we've tried wealth taxes in the past. They failed. Hence, they will never work. Forget about it." Or you can look at it and you can say, "Okay, let's try to understand the problems. Let's try to draw lessons. And let's try to see if we can fix those issues, whether they have solutions." And that's what I've tried to do in the book. And the answer is, "Yeah, they have solutions. So there were two problems. Number one was that the super rich were legally exempted. So those wealth taxes had all sorts of exemptions of loopholes, which in practice kind of slash tax revenues and led to very unfair, regressive wealth taxes. But of course, the solution is obvious. Write the law differently. Don't put those loopholes. So make it very simple. Just one paragraph. If you have more than 100 million pounds, you have to pay 2% in personal taxes. Period. Now if it's written like that, no loopholes, what can you do? And the second problem, which also has a solution, but is the bigger problem in many ways, is the problem of migration. Well, it's what was going to rescue her. That's the most important. You know, in all those debates, it always boils down to, "We can't tax the very rich because they're going to move to Dubai or what have you." And it's true that past wealth taxes, they never address that problem. But that problem of course has a solution. Tax, exile, out migration by the very rich. It's not a law of nature like gravity. It's man-made. International tax competition, more broadly, is man-made. We can choose to accept it. We can choose to encourage it or we can choose to fight it. So how can we do? Let's imagine that tomorrow the UK introduces this 2% minimum tax on the super rich and their wealth. It's crucial at the same time to say, "Okay, if someone moves out of the UK, we will keep taxing that person for a number of years after they've left. We will keep treating that person as a tax resident of the UK for 5 or 10 or 15 years. We can discuss." And it's obvious, first of all, that you should do it because if you've become a billionaire in the UK, it's in large part the social creations because you've benefited from public infrastructure and education and local that have protected the properties of your properties and so on. And so there is no natural right once you've become extremely rich to succeed from society and have no tax to pay anymore. Do you think you would have to have, and this may be very difficult to achieve? It's a bit like the old debate, isn't it? You can have socialism in one country. Can you do this in one country? Because there's always going to be an incentive for some state, even European states. Ireland is famous, has a very low corporation tax rate. There's always going to be an incentive for someone to actually say, "We're not going to do this. Come here. We're the home of the super rich and you can spend your money here." But that's always going to be the case, isn't it? Perhaps. But with the system that I described, it would not matter. What's really important to understand is that any country individually can fight those forces of international competition. Any country can say, "If you have lived for a long time in our country," I say the UK. Number one. And number two, you've become very rich in our country. And now you move abroad, we keep taxing you. And if they refuse to pay? Let me first explain how this would work and then we can answer that. So that it would become neutral on their taxes to live in London or in Dubai or in Monaco or what have you. They would pay exactly the same. Now, if they refuse to pay, they would be breaking the law. If they break the law, we do what we do when people break the law. So there's a court case and there can be some asset seizure, for instance. And look, those billionaires, even if they moved to another country, they will always have ties with the UK. They want to travel, they have family, they have friends, they have networks. But also, more fundamentally, they derive their wealth from owning multinational companies that have assets in the UK or that have say as customers in the UK. And so that gives leverage to the UK government to kind of enforce the law. And so that's really the most important thing to understand. Any country on its own can ensure that there is no incentive for very wealthy people to relocate abroad. And that even if they relocate, they would still have to pay the tax. One of the practical questions before we wrap up. You've already alluded to this yourself. In terms of actually assessing the wealth of these people, it's very difficult. I mean, they often lead quite shadowy, opaque lives. They're not particularly interested in telling authorities just how much wealth they've got. You know, they can have private companies, they can have art, they can have land, they can have trust, they can have IP. Isn't it quite difficult to actually assess these people's wealth and how much of it would be taxable in any particular jurisdiction? Yeah, no, it's not complicated. You know, 90% of the wealth of the super rich corresponds to shares in companies. But half of these companies are listed in the stock market, with observable market values. The other half is private firms, but by definition because we're talking about very wealthy people, these are going to be big private corporations. We know how to value those. You look at how similar companies are valued by the stock market, for instance. And of course, there are also okay yards and works of art and the Picasso's. But the Picasso's, they're insured. And so there's an insurance value that you can use also to measure the wealth of those individuals. And so remember, we're talking about 1000 roughly people who have more than 100 million pounds in the UK. So you could have really high audit rates, a bit like for multinational firms. There are always, they have 100% audit rate. You could do the same for those super rich people. Finally then, the left around the world is often particularly the centre left, getting buffeted by the populist right, by sometimes the populist left. You've got people like here, Starmor looking for an agenda, the French left, obviously bracing up for or bracing for the 2027 presidential election Democrats in the US. Do you think, I mean, presumably you're talking to quite a few of these people, interested in your ideas. Do you think that this is at least part of the answer for the Social Democratic centre left? Well, I think it's a crucial part of the answer, frankly, because you look at open and pause and everywhere you have 80-90% of the population, which is in favour of that. You never see such popular support for any other concrete economic or social policy reform. There's over gigantic democratic support for this proposal. But it's true that at the moment or right and the far right, they don't like it. Like in France, they all voted against it last year when it was very close to passing in parliament during the budget. And by voting against it, they are protecting a system which is deeply flawed and it's a system where our basic principle of equality before the law is violated. That's the situation today. We have more lenient laws for the ultra-wealthy and for the rest of the population. And you know, most of you always have a small fraction of the population, which is okay with that, which thinks the law should be more lenient with the super-arriage and harsh on the poor, harsh on immigrants, but it's only a small fraction of the population. Most of the population wants equality before the law. And that's where this unavoidable minimum tax on the super-arriage will achieve. Professor Gabriel Zitwin. Such a pleasure. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. [Music] Well, I found that absolutely captivating. As I say, Gabriel Zuckman's book, "More of a short manifesto" really. We need to tax billionaires is out now. Thomas Picketty. Eat Your Curse Out. That is it from all of us on the news agents for this week. Thanks to our production team. On the news agent Shane Fennelly, Michaela Walters, Natalie Inge, Arvin Badowel and at George Rich, Jess Williamson, Mikey Bags and Lizzie Ward, our executive producer, is Louis Dagen Hart. Our editor is Tom Hughes. It's presented by me, Louis Gould, all Emily Maillys, and when he can be bothered to be in the right hemisphere, John, the barbecue soap, all enjoy, the bank holiday weekend. See you next Tuesday. This has been a global player, original production.