The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman)

Thanks for listening to The Restless Politics, sign up to The Restless Politics plus to enjoy ad-free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestlessPolities.com. That's TheRestlessPolities.com. The wealth of billionaires has exploded. It is the most important challenge in the 21st century. The proposal is for people who have more than a hundred million pounds. You should be paying a minimum amount of tax equal to 2% of your wealth. There are so many assumptions making I'm sorry. What are the risks? What are the costs? What are the benefits this progress? If they move, we'll keep taxing them. Period. You're not an expert on UK law. You're not an expert on the UK budget tree press sense. So then what is the benefit? What is the problem you're trying to solve? It is this regressivity problem that I'm trying to fix. So it's a question of finance. It's a basic question of equality. Before the law. And the fact that they might threaten to leave that shouldn't serve as an excuse. They don't pay income tax. They pay corporate tax. No. The holding companies don't pay corporation tax. What sort of tax do they pay? It is a disaster for problems. Listen, I agree to you. It is disgusting that these two press are wealthy. They don't need the money. So why isn't a party doing it? Is the message we want to pass the world? If you move to Britain, you're trapped. We're going to tax you for the next 15 years in your life. Most people do the money before the last. A lot of the people you're talking about, they feel that because of the wealth that they have, they actually have more power than people with power. Is it not possible that actually it's going to take another revolution before this gets fixed? This episode is presented by IG. Now as a listener of this podcast, you're no down acutely aware of the world's unstable political landscape and how it can affect your money. Exactly. It can be incredibly frustrating to feel like yet another maddening decision made in Westminster or Brussels or dare I say Washington can directly affect your finances. But IG can be a real help. Something at least which might help you avoid losing sleep when we lose yet another British Prime Minister. With access to global stock shares and ETFs, IG gives investors like you the tools to build a portfolio that reaches beyond the realm of political instability, all with zero commission on investments and no annual fees. Backed by over 50 years of heritage, IG is built for investors who think beyond the current new cycle. Search IG.com to find out more. IG, trade, invest, progress. Capital risk, other fees may apply. Welcome to the rest of this politics leading with Miro Resturés and me, Alistair Campbell. Now a lot of our listeners and viewers seem to like it when we have left-wing economists with big ideas on leading. We've had Kate Reewith, Janis Farrifakis and Gary Stephenson who ever since has been nagging us to get on our guest today, Gabrielle Zuckman. And so many of our listeners and viewers too. So here we are, we're in Paris and here he is. He's the professor at Barclay and the Paris School of Economics. He's best known for his work on exposing tax havens and also for a proposal for a wealth tax or as he prefers to call it minimum income tax guarantee. And when we've discussed these ideas before, I share passionately the belief that inequality is a massive problem and potentially democracy threatening problem, but I worry about the how of implementation. And Rouris perhaps even more skeptical and worries even about the why. But we're going to with open minds and on a trécontant de tréâler avec vous. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming to Paris. Good little suit to begin. We're sitting here in a bunch of the École en Occupierre here and you are one of the kind of products of this extraordinary French educational system but also been in Britain and the States. So can you locate first how much you think your thoughts about inequality, billionaires come from your personal experience, your experience in France, the problems that France is facing, maybe a little glimpse into French politics where the extreme left and extreme right seem to be doing better than they were a few years ago. For me what's been important is I've spent about 10 years in California in Berkeley. And this has legitimized me a little bit because in the day area of San Francisco you have extreme wealth, you have the wealth to billionaires and you have extreme poverty, tens of thousands of homeless people. And year after year I had impression that this was getting worse and that the democratic party in particular was not able to propose some solutions to that problem. And so I've seen the explosion of U.S. inequality, the consequences that this has for politics and for democracy in the U.S. and I think it's really extreme. If you look at the level of plutocratic capture that's happening today in the U.S., I think even people who are skeptical about the path of the U.S. economy 10 or 15 years ago, none of them could have imagined what's happening today with Trump and how is governing. So this has encouraged me to work more on these issues. And what I want to emphasize is that the explosion of billionaire wealth is not just in the San Francisco Bay area, it's a global phenomenon. And in fact it's probably one of the defining features of the well economy of the last 15 years. So one of the things that has happened in California is that they have now got a tax coming in on billionaires. What do you make of explain the tax that bring them in California? What impact is it going to have? Is this the kind of model you're looking for around the world? Because that's a real example, right? Of the place you're complaining about and the same response. So first of all, as we speak today, it's not yet 100% sure that the California billionaire tax is going to be under ballot in November. But there's a fair chance. And so what is it about? It's a proposal to create a one-off or one-time 5% wealth tax on the wealth of California's billionaires. The billionaires of California, you have about 225 of them, they own in wealth, wealth equivalent to 50% of California's GDP. That's really an enormous amount of wealth. And if you tax them at only 5%, the state of California could get about 100 billion dollars in tax revenue. And they want to use that to offset the deep cuts that Trump has made to Medicaid funding. She's a federal program for health insurance for low-income Americans. And so there's just a big hole in the budget of California for health care. And so they want to, they need more money. What's interesting is that it's both very big in terms of potential tax revenue, but it's also very tiny relative to the wealth of the billionaires or the explosion of their wealth because over the last two years their wealth has increased 150%. Right, so you take 5%, absolutely nothing is going to change for them. But it will make a big difference for the state of California, for your 40 million people. Can I ask you what you mean by wealth? What are we actually talking about? Are we talking land? Are we talking income? Are we talking property? Are we talking corporation? Are we talking crypto? How do we assess how much wealth an individual has? So what is wealth? Wealth is the value of everything that you own, financial assets and non-financial assets, net of debts. So it includes everything. It includes for billionaires, primarily its shares in companies. It's equity in the businesses that they own. For the super rich, there is sometimes this view that wealth is very complicated. But the reality is that it's quite simple. About half of it globally and in the UK in particular, corresponds to shares in public listed companies, listed under stock market. So very clear, observable value. And most of the rest corresponds to shares in big private companies. But because we're talking about billionaires, these are going to be large corporations, not listed under stock market, but very complicated to value because we know how to value big companies. We look at how similar businesses that are listed under stock market are value by the stock market. And it may just finish by saying that of course there is a bit more than that. So for instance, the billionaires, they have paintings, the Picasso's, the yachts and crypto, all of that exists. But first, it's only a small fraction of their wealth. And second, even those forms of assets are not very hard to value. For instance, if you own a very valuable painting, there's an insurance value, it's insured. And so you can use that. - A base for that. - But if you're, I don't know, Jeff Bezos, who, and we all know the story, that he takes no income. He's one of the richest men in the world. He even got a tax credit for one of his kids, which is utterly obscene. Everybody can agree with that. But at the same time, are we seriously saying that something like him is gonna have to, in his tax returns, list all his paintings, list all his cars, list all his watches? I'm just gonna get a feeling of how you come to a view that this is a person's wealth. How we assess that? So first of all, you have to avoid a mistake that was done in the past by all the countries that used to have wealth taxes, which is to let people self-report. You know, if you let people self-report on their wealth, some of them are going to report honestly, but there's also going to be sometimes the temptation, forget about some assets, or to undervalue others. And so the better way to proceed is to have the government send a pre-populated wealth tax return based on the information that government, HMRC in the UK, already connects. And the government has access to a lot of data on wealth. There's the land registry for real estate. There is now an automatic exchange of bank information between countries. So HMRC actually received data on the wealth held by Britain's inferring banks. There's been for a long time an automatic exchange of information between domestic financial institutions and the tax authority. So the right way to proceed in my view is HMRC should use the owner of the information, send a pre-populated return saying, okay, based on what we know, and based on the assessment that we've made of the value of the businesses that you own, we think that your wealth is X, that's a billion pounds. And of course, taxpayers then could make corrections and amendments, and that's okay. But the opening did, if you want, has to be made by the tax administration. - So when we're talking about these billionaires, probably the most dramatic world-changing example is what's happening in California. And the loss of this is the story about American tech and hypostatic. This is Elon Musk sets up Tesla. He starts with shares which are worth $1.00, they're now worth $170, or he launches SpaceX, or Jeff Bezos starts out of his father-in-law's backyard. And now he's, do you know what I'm saying, right? And it's a very, very interesting, very rapid kind of wealth. I mean, these guys 10, 50 years ago had much, much less money. And the reason that Elon Musk is a trillionaire, whereas two weeks ago, I think he was worth 600 billion, is because he just did the SpaceX IPO, where suddenly he's like projecting, he's gonna land people on Mars, he's gonna have data centers and sky et cetera. So you're analyzing as an economist, something which is also technological and cultural, right? It's a very, very strange new development in the way that wealth is generated and the rapidity that's generated. I think it's part of the story to be sure the rise of tech and then, say, in California, you talk about-- - Okay, but I'd say, yes. But if you look at the world, let's focus 200 people, California, 50%. - Where's, sure, I mean, in California, a lot of the wealth of billionaires corresponds to wealth that belongs to tech people. - And most of them are founders, co-founders, early investors and tech startups. - Absolutely, yeah. But I think that it's not relevant to what sector they operate in, what are the individual merits or the merits of the people involved. Taxation, wealth taxation is not about people, it's not about their characters. It's about money, it's about budget, it's about how we organize our collective spending. And so the fact that they've been operating in this industry, I think, should not matter. They've all benefited from governance spending and giving many ways like space X would not be possible without all the investments that it was. - But for California-- - There's two different moves, honey. On the one hand, you say, it doesn't matter how they make the money. On the next moment, she said, oh, they made the money with government subsidy. So it sounds ordinary. - Or like all wealth sub-retions. - So it's one or the other, either you're saying, I don't care how they made the money, or you're saying they didn't make their money in the right way because they made them on themselves. - No, what I want to say is that the tax rate should not be decided based on the individual trajectories or merits of the individual. - And it is the worst thing, though. So you have good people among the ordinary, you have less good people, and it just doesn't matter at all. Is the risk, though, that this is a classic economist's position? All other things, the unequal here are these rational people. It doesn't matter who they are, it doesn't matter what industry they're in. We're just gonna treat them all the same. But of course, in reality, these things go wrong, precisely because the incentives of individuals, the incentives of particular sectors matter. So the real question I suppose, if I can't pose it to you, is not, how do we tax yesterday's been in there? - Yeah. - You know, how do we tax the billionaires of the future? - Okay. - Right. - So, and what are the incentive structures which are going to determine, let's say you're setting up a big tech company, whether you are going to put yourself in France, where Gabrielle is going to tax you, or whether you're gonna put yourself in Texas where somebody's not going to take you. - Okay, so let's talk about these two issues, which is one, would the tax on wealth 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. Every thousands of students who then went to a long-term business, working 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 no, 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, or a centimillionaire. It's just such an unlikely event, you know, we're talking about a 0.0001% chance that you are going to have such success, that nobody aged 20, 25, you know, 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, who have heard of 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. You know, what really matters to anchorage, to foster innovation, is not to guarantee a 0% tax rate on billionaires, but is to invest in education, a higher education in public infrastructure, in healthcare, in all these core and giants of economic growth. This is how the UK and France and the US have become prosperous countries, is 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. - And the mobility point? - As a 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'll 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. So you can move to Dubai, it makes not different. 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. What 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 decides 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. But if you look at where all billion is, billion are, this is going to require, even if I do agree with you about the horrors of inequality, it's going to require a level of political will that I'm not sure in our democratic systems exist. You can have to get the US government to buy it at some point. China, I was in Hong Kong recently, they've just overtaken, Hong Kong was just overtaken Switzerland as the biggest wealth hub in the world, communist China. Europe mentioned UK, France. So this is a great idea to have, but how do you make it happen? You don't need an international agreement to make it work. Any country on its own can say, first, we are going to test 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 your pay. And you don't think if one country did that, you don't accept the resigning that a lot of them would actually say, well, we'll take our money elsewhere or doesn't that matter? So, so any country can say, first, we're going to test our 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, you need that truly on its own, can decide to do it. And so then the question is, okay, is there ever going to be the critical will in any country, whether it's France or the UK, to actually do that alone? Can you think there is? 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 that profit at 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 of flat income tax rates. And then they introduced a progressive income tax in the UK, the famous Beatles 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 Beatles 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 progressive income tax, one century after that, everybody recognized it by a large, it's a big success, except just end with that, except that the billionaires have not yet entered into the system. They are mostly not paying any or any significant amount of income tax. That's a problem. And as an introduction, I kind of defile you as a lack-wing economist, but is there not a sense that the biggest beneficiaries of this could be the very, very wealthy people just short of being billionaires? Because you've got this label, billionaire, and you've got this title. But then you've got an awful lot of people just below that who are going to be very, very wealthy. Is it progressive? That's a good question. So first of all, the proposal, just to make sure I have the very understanding, is to create a minimum tax for people who have more than 100 million pounds of 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. You've mentioned the case of Jeff Bezos. Today we have super rich people who pay zero. I think all of us will agree that it's not acceptable. - Pardon me? - Hey, 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? 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 sea 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 to make. - You see, it's also from the bottom working out, right? From the top working down. - So what I'm saying is that if you have more than 100 million pounds, you should pay a minimum each 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, you're 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%? The right has not been chosen randomly, of course, is the right that would ensure that the super rich would pay as much tax, or at you to their income, than the average tax pay. - What is 3? - Basically, if they're 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 take 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 a recent research effort, international research effort, that has established that above 100 million roughly speaking, the income tax vanishes, in particular because the super rich above that level use holding companies in quasi-systematic manner to center their income from taxation. So to bring differently, people who have 1 million, 5 million, either 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, you could know that the threshold, but it wouldn't make any difference, right? Because they're 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 it's for those super rich individuals that the rise of inequality has been the most striking. The wealth inequality has 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 they had spent their wealth, they could have bought equivalent of 5% of all the goods and services producing a given year in the UK. Today, the number is 20%. So you have 200 families who could buy if they spend their money or their wealth, they could buy the fifth of everything that's producing a given year in the UK. There are so many moves you're making here, right? So many moves, so many assumptions you're making. I'm sorry. Your statement that the best way to generate productivity is investment in public education and infrastructure. Look at the competitive relationship between California, the UK, and Europe over the last 10, 15 years, the time when these guys made all the money. It would be ridiculous to say that the US made that money because of investment in public education infrastructure. In fact, their investment in public education infrastructure is much worse than Europe on almost every indicator, right? The kind of productivity investments you're talking about, Western Europe is far better than the United States and if that was the main driver of this growth, you would expect UK, French, German growth to be much, much stronger than the US. Where do these billionaires you're talking about in the UK? Where did they come from? Where do they actually make their money? When John Frederickson moves from Sweden to the United Kingdom, the genie coefficient in Britain goes in the wrong direction because this massive Swedish billionaire has moved to Britain, right? He departs the country again, the genie coefficient goes in a different direction. Has the quality improved in Britain? Has anyone's lives got worse when he moves here? Has anyone's lives got worse? Now, which brings me to the bigger question, right? What are the risks? What are the costs? What are the benefits this proposal? So presumably, you acknowledge there are some risks and your major leverist taxation. So there is some risk, you know, you think very little but there must be some risk that some people will move. There must be some risk that your idea that you can chase them for 10 or 15 years to get their money is not going to work. There will be a legal challenge. You're not an expert on UK law, as human rights law, you're not an expert on the UK budget tree process but it seems to me perfectly possible that the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced on such and such a date, we're going to chase people for 10 or 15 years, they leave. So, there's a risk. So, then what is the benefit? What is the revenue that you propose to generate from this change? And what is the problem you're trying to solve? Are you trying to solve housing? Are you trying to solve income inequality? Are you trying to get Britain to be more productive? And does the problem you're trying to solve justify this risk and cost-benefit? That's a lot of questions. So, what is the problem we're 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 how does this compare to the rise of the population. And we're talking about here the UK, not US, so just to explain. So, in the UK, the basic problem is that they are largely paying capital gains tax, which is 24%. No, that's not the basic. That's not the problem. 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 right 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 and 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 pay corporation tax. No, the holding companies don't pay corporation tax. That's the problem. They just don't pay you. You're saying holding companies in the United Kingdom and pay no tax. 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. If I can go back to 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. The individual here, which was one of the largest fortune of the time. And so what they fell out is that there was 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 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 have 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 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 the money stays in the holding company, you don't have income tax to pay. But there's some sequence for that. Because this is 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 tax is everything. It's going to be depending on the country around 30, 40, 50% of their income. For the middle class, the effective tax rate, all tax included increases a little bit, for the upper middle class, it increases a little bit. And that for billionaires, it collapses. It collapses 25% in France to most reasonable people, I think that is utterly unacceptable. I guess the question is whether this is the way to address that. So I think with some of these corporations, what are you trying to address? You're just trying to address the fact that I'm paying tax. So there's some social problem you're trying to fix. So let me just finish to this. This is very important question. So what are we trying to fix? So 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 tax or higher to do their income than to raise the money. Okay, but let me just make a different point. The point I was going to make is that it goes back to political will. When Gordon Brown was chancellor and prime minister, he was rightly in my view utterly obsessed with this issue of tax savings. Okay? And I think tried very, very hard in lots of different ways to try to get around them. Now you've studied the tax savings. Is there not something difficult about the assumption that first of all, governments are going to buy into this, which they have to do, but also that then you won't just have more and more people finding ways around it unless actually you do get rid of any kind of competitiveness around tax. Because the truth is right now a lot of these people that are paying literally zero tax, who I despise and you despise and lots of other people do. But what they're doing is using legitimate means to put money into countries, you know, the Cayman Islands does exist, the Channel Islands do exist, you know, these places are there. So unless we're actually some Luxembourg exists, unless we're and how do you do that within your opinion? No, but okay, so you are concerned about something else. Nothing that 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 wealth tax on the super rich, their 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. So now there's a question of enforcement, are they going to try to hide their wealth? And the good news is that a lot has happened since Golden 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. But before that there was a complete bank secret in Switzerland and other places, very easy for rich people to hide their wealth, rampant tax evasion, a huge problem since 2018 all the banks in all tax havens have to automatically report to HMRC under 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 on a brawl that shows up. We've studied that in different countries and creating Denmark. So it makes it much easier today to enforce a wealth tax on the super rich than 10 years. Okay, so to return. So we were talking about risks. I think we disagree on the risks of whether they will move or not. 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 right the law like that. So the paragraph that says if you move, we keep taxing you after you've moved. So there's no incentive to move for it. So the risk there, there's a second risk which is that you can't write the law in that way. That it's difficult to write retrospective laws of that sort. Okay, so let's say you're the Swedish billionaire, you move to Britain, suddenly Gabrielle stands up in the House of Commons and says you're trapped. Either you pay for 10 or 15 years or you will make it here. You're not going to be able to leave this country. I wonder whether you will be able to do that a quickly enough to prevent them leaving, which has been a problem like California, right? Or secondly, whether the way they do it challenges. So I think there is a risk that. So let me let me try to answer that question because I 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 tail, which means that if you move to another country for 10 years and you've died abroad for a period of 10 years, you still have to pay inheritance tax in the UK. That's already in the UK law. Microples is just to extend that logic to also apply that logical having a tail or a trailing tax to this minimum tax on the superlage. But the legal basis pretty exists in the UK tax law. Okay, so we can come back to the question of whether they will leave before the sentence, but what I'm trying to say is let's say there's a risk. What is the financial benefit of doing this. How much she calculated this is going to generate in revenue for the government compared to the potential risks. 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 free-precise estimate. There's a margin of error. The estimate is that we have a base on the Sunday Times magazine Rich List. Pops that will estimate the wealth of the super rich, pops the underestimated missing 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 two percent rate. Let me just. UK citizens who you care about? No residents. Just the residents. So it's excluding those who have already moved, who live in Manacore. But just the residents. Including many people who are not UK citizens who chose to leave. It doesn't matter. The tax would apply to residents, even non-citizens. What matters is residents. Let me take those residents in the Sunday Times Rich List. The base is 25% of GDP. They pay almost no income tax today. And so you apply two percent to the base and you get two percent times 25%. That's revenue of 0.5% of GDP. That's the bullpup number. I want to emphasize that there is a margin of L for the reasons that I mentioned. 0.5% 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 the 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 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'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, Kiosdano famously tried to get 1.5 billion pounds by scrapping a fuel allowances for retirees. 1.5 billion. Here we're talking 10 times more money, 15 billion from just roughly 1000 families who pay very low tax today. Because it's only applying to, not only those who are actually wealthy, 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. You use a phrase in your book and I love your audacity having this book. It is so short. This is the latest thing that's got this debate going. I don't know there's a story behind that. But there's a lot of content. There's a lot of content. It's very interesting. But there's a line in there where you talk about we have an unfinished revolution. And here we are in Paris. We've seen one of the greatest revolutions of all time. And I think there is a genuine worry about the extent to which democracy becomes undermined as this gap goes on and on and gets bigger and bigger and we don't seem to be able to close it. And that's just your point, Roy. I think it is partly about fairness, but it's also about the sense of everyone feeling that they're part of the same economy and the same society. And they now feel we have these people in a different universe. So two questions really. And the first relation is it seems to me that a lot of the people you were talking about when we've mentioned the two or three of the musk and bees, us and these guys, they feel that because of the wealth that they have, they actually have more power than people with power, the politicians. So this is the risk, the democracy, the politicians now have no power. So is it not possible that actually it's going to take another revolution before this gets fixed? I want to be very clear about the fact that it's not a two percent tax on Bioneer wealth that's going to be remotely enough to reduce the concentration of wealth and hence the concentration of power. The two percent 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 many ways a bigger problem, which is that with the explosion of the wealth of billionaires, we've had an explosion of their power, the power to influence markets, the power to influence the prevailing ideology by buying 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 read about all the way back to Aristotle to someone like Leia E.P. 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. Do you think that governments in a way or government as we understand it has become incapable of making the decisions with popular support? Because there's something extraordinary about the extent to which poor people at the moment, in all the countries, poor people are voting to put into power people who pride themselves in saying I can beat the system. They don't pay that much tax. Trump's a great example of that. But most people in the fast 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% in the moment. And they're voting for parties that actually will work against those interests. Yes, but also because there's no party on the other side of the spectrum that's actually proposing to enact those things of very few parties. So that's the problem we have. So, Diary of this. I agree to you. It is disgusting that these two plus are wealthy. It's ridiculous. What is the point of having $1 trillion? Why are they not taking any income? Well, they're not actually spending very much money compared to the money they've had. They're just accumulating wealth and power. It's ludicrous and their power is disgusting. And inequality is disgusting. And as you say, the fundamental problem is actually we're not talking about real inequality. We're not talking about Africa, we're not talking about living in global extreme poverty there. But what I worry about with this is that we're putting a lot of different things that we are angry about, discussed that about worried about from different countries, different contexts together. And the reason why everybody loves it is we hate Elon Musk with reason. You maybe don't. I don't like Elon Musk. We think it's ridiculous that they have all this money. It's absurd. We think it's unjust that they don't pay tax. We feel inequality is rising. But then they say, "So why is no party doing it?" So anybody listening to this is like, "Well, this is crazy. Why don't they just listen together?" He's got this obvious answer to it. Now, the reason why they don't do it, of course, is they disagree. So, let me try to be that and try to explain why the Conservative Party doesn't do it, why the Labour Party doesn't do it, why Lib Dems don't do it. In fact, why only the Green Party in Britain is flirting with this idea. And the answer is that I imagine most people in the Labour Party would agree without a stir, right? They're horrified by inequality. They're disgusted by this bananas. What they would say is cost benefit risk. The benefit that you're talking about is potentially something like one-hunglith of the government budget, in a 1% of the UK's budget that you're talking about. So the question the Treasury would ask you, or Labour would ask you, Andy Burnham would ask you if this was Andy Burnham's thing here, is it worth doing this for the possible upside of 1% of the budget? And why don't they do it? And they might say, listen, there's other things I might want to do. I might want to put capital gains tax up. It's very, very strange in Britain that if Alistair and I go and invest in shares, we pay 24% on our share income here, but we pay 45% on our other end. So we might want to equalize CGT and in absolutely here, and it's maybe a better thing to do. I think either or, it could do that. Their anxiety is just at the moment where Britain is really struggling economically. Where an AI tech revolution is taking place, where we are trying to be the most pro-business, pro-friendly, pro-tech country in the world. When America is roaring ahead, is the message we want to pass to the world for the sake of 1% of the government budget if you come from Sweden or the United States and you move to Britain, you're trapped. You're not going anywhere. We're going to tax you for the next 15 years of your life. Your trap, just like people are trapped in the US because of the West has citizens. If you put the West from the West. you become a US citizen. Right. If you become a US citizen, with all the benefits of your citizenship, and you can choose to do that, and many people don't take your citizenship for that reason, you're not proposing that. You're not saying British citizens would pay. If you did it just to British citizens, you would get very little money. What I'm saying is that the US has had these citizens' based taxation. You cannot avoid it. And they are worse. America is worse, much worse on every indicator with the billionaires. The billionaires own a bigger proportion of GDP. They pay less tax. Oh yeah, I know, sure. Right. OK, US citizenship, US does holding comes from this. These are not the models. 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. Remember that for half of the 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 two million dollars today. Hence I propose to create a 100% tax on all incomes above 25,000 dollars. And they nearly did it. They did 94%. No, it's really 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. They used to have the most progressive taxes in the world and they went only in the opposite direction. What's been the consequence of that? That economic growth has declined very substantially. It was 2% per year on average between 1946 and 1980. It's been 1.4%. It's not a high number. People think that there's been a growth miracle in the US since Reagan. No, 1.4% per year in growth since 1980. And not only growth has declined, but it has become very unequal. It distributed. And for the working class incomes have nearly stagnated. For the super rich, there's been an explosion. But we might be exploding up their income in their wealth. To such an extent that today the wealth of, I don't know how you want to call them, the oligarchs, the top point, 0.001% wealth, just Americans, is equivalent to 14% of US GDP. It was 3% at the height of the guilty age 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 when the US had almost a candidate position, we stood afraid of to slash spending that he didn't like with the so-called Department of Government efficiency dodge. 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 the world, frankly, because when they destroyed US aid, this implies millions of death, including of children of less than five years old, or around the world. really catastrophically consequences for us. - No we agree on that. As we are in France, can I just take your pulse on the French political scene right now. Because here we are talking about ideas that I think a lot of people on the left of the French parties that would think, "Yep, this is the way to go." - And on the right. Other. - All right, on the left. - Others. 86% of the population is in favor. If this is not the right panel, but it's the left panel that is in favor of the party. In power. - In power. - Yes. - Because there's a disconnect between the popular and democratic support and demand and what's currently being legislated. - My point is that you've got the left that would be broadly supportive of what you're saying. You've got people like Le Pen and Bardela who would-- - Dug-ins. - Against, and even if some of their voters are in favor. And yet, it's hard to see at the moment. I know a lot can happen. There's a long, well, there's not that long, but it's next year the president election. The hard right looks closer to power than it's ever done in France. 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 debate that we had in Patron de Fault last year in France forced them to clarify what this then for. And they said, look, we think that the billionaires are untouchable. If we tried to tax them, they would 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 of you, but it's a view that most people find appalling. Most people, they don't accept. This is such a fundamental dimension of what means to leave the democracy, of what means to leave 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 leave in your own parallel society and not contribute like the rest of the population. That's just not acceptable. Look, I agree with that. But do you think that the right now, let's just get back to the broader political question, is your sense that they are going to be in power here? What's your sense right now where French politics lies? I think it depends a lot on what the debate is going to be about. So if you talk more about the 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 it's not kind of talking enough about those questions, then we talk about other things about immigration, but what have you. And the right and the far right has a chance to win. I'm trying to understand how serious you are about stating, for example, that 94% tax has no impact. That this story of FDR, 94% tax, nobody can know about human annoys, had no-- I think that's positive impact. Positive impact. Positive. Society of the country. So you would endorse it then. 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 a different tax policy. So what the counterfactual is. 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.modular income tax phrase for really wealthy, very wealthy people. And they did it for income tax, but also for inheritance tax with rates of nearly 80%. 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, like many other economies, had that experience. It seems like growth was strong. Investment was strong. And there was much more volatility. So to clarify, you would favor a 94% income tax and an 80% inheritance tax. And you believe it would have no impact on growth. In fact, it would be much positive. This is-- I mean, this is not-- What you would favor today. Why not? Because the problem with our income tax is that the owners report no of the real income. And we are not going to fix that problem with 90%. Top-modular income tax rates were 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. Popps 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 comeback. So we need to invent-- my proposal is not to say, let's do what was done in the past, was OK, let's kind of repeat all the recipes. That's not the situation in 2026. It's very different. The situation in 1950. We have trillionaires. We have booming, being on our wealth. If I know income tax, now the challenge is how do we fix that product? But the normal-- sorry, you give this-- do it all. Put out capital gains tax, put up inheritance tax, Good luck. income tax, do the world's tax? Why not? What's the downside on doing it all? What's the disadvantage of having 94% in the tax, 80% in the average in the tax? Why not? Why not? You know, why not? I think my reading of the historical experience is that those Roosevelt's type top-marjor income tax rates were not bad policy. Well, 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 not that it's changing the distribution of market income or predestribution, 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 curved the various forms of rent extraction 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, okay, 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, they are not very positive. Some, you know, 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 to mean less money for shareholders, less money for workers. So those sky high incomes, buy and large, or I think the historical record suggests that buy and large there's your some processes. There is a fundamental injustice in our fiscal system. This injustice is that the best is not to pay or almost taxes on the income. It suggests a violation of the fundamental principle of equality in front of the law and the most logical way to solve this problem is to create a minimum minimum of a low income on the very large fortune equal to 2% of the minimum of the average. Very sure. Thank you. Thank you. I tried my best. It was very elegant and I was such a wonderful French idealistic language. I loved it. The fundamental principle, that's not what. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So what did she think of Gabriel Zuckman there? You know, he's got it all. It's actually he was praising 96% income tax. Huge inheritance taxes. I was within quite a long part of the journey. If we just wind back a bit, we interviewed Gary Stevenson a while back and he'd just met, I think, Gabriel Zuckman and he'd been to Paris to see the work that he was doing on on how he actually formulated wealth tax. And he was adamant. This guy shows how this can be done and how a government can do it. Now, I am absolutely persuaded of the importance of inequality as an issue. I'm absolutely persuaded that it's getting worse, not better. I have something close to contempt for people who see the pursuit of their own personal wealth as the only thing that matters in the world. I'm still not sure how this operates in practice other than in a very idealistic world. And the trouble with politics, particularly today, is it's not very idealistic. So, and I saw you were more sympathetic towards these arguments, probably until he did get to that point of essentially saying, however high you put the tax rate, I don't really care. One of the things that was so striking about that is that it's very much about principles, fairness, rules. If you really wanted to push him and I didn't get the chance to do that, is say, would you do this even if it didn't raise more revenue? I mean, is it that you basically just think it's unjust that rich people should pay less tax largely because they own a lot of shares. They've taken their money and they've invested it in shares and they pay capital gains tax in the case of the UK, rather than income tax. Would you go after them just to make things fairer, even if it meant less money for the X-Checker? And I suspect he probably would. And I think it's a question maybe for Zach Plantski might be a question for Gary Stevenson. Is there a practical policy where you genuinely want to guess into an argument or whether about it's going to raise more money for the NHS, whether it's going to lead to more growth? In which case, there's a lot of people out there who are going to be disagreeing with you. Definitely, certainly the Treasury mainstream. thinks this would be insane, but also even countryside Sweden, which a lot of us admire, abandoned these types of taxes and concluded these were real drags on growth. Or is it just a statement we don't care how much damage it does to the economy? We think this is the right thing to do because we don't think there should be very rich people, which is fine, but it's a very different type of argument. I like a good idealist and I'll see his clever. He's smart and I think the work he did earlier on in his career on tax evasion is incredibly important. I think tax evasion and the industry that surrounds it is appalling. And we have kind of just let it grow and grow and grow and grow. I watched the rest of his money interview with Dan Needle and Dan Needle, who I think has got you know, a lot going from and he's very, very clever understands tax, but he was absolutely dismissive of this. He basically says this is like fantasy football with tax. It's just absolutely ridiculous. I thought Stefan the government made a really good point. He's not a politician. He's somebody who's got an idea and he's trying to make that idea go mainstream, which is what Gary Stevens trying to do, you know, tax wealth not work. And so that's an important contribution to our debate. Well, my challenge to you and to listeners on the left is, are you prepared to let us do a good interview with Dan Needle to put the more mainstream view or are we only interested in hearing the idea of the city. So I think we should get down on because and I don't want to repeat his arguments, but it's very tempting in politics to imagine that there is some radical switch that you can hit, which is going to sort everything out. And that of course is what's being offered here by Gabriel's argument, which is the idea that there is something that you could do, which is effectively ramping up the taxes on the rich and then trapping them in the country by saying that if you try to leave, we're going to imprison you and chase you for 10 or 15 years, which is something going to turn everything around. Of course saying that. Presumably the answer actually, I guess, but maybe this is just me as a small seat conservative, is that actually really making our country as better as about making our institutions better. You know, the really hard work of the head teacher and the teacher's making school better, making a prison better, really getting our defense procurement sorted out. It isn't that there's some magic thing that nobody's thought of hanging in the back of somebody's pocket, which of only you introduced that everything would be better. I think that is a real reason why people experimented with with world taxes and got rid of them. And I'd like somebody to come in and explain that before everybody gets excited with the idea that there's some magic move that can be made. Yeah, I don't think it is a magic move, but I think it's an interesting part of the inequality debate. I think all parties, Elbow, in terms of getting that across. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon and leave any of the major economies. But you know, he's quite something to have a tax named after you. Malcolm Turnbull in the interview with him talked about the Giddens paradox. Anthony Giddens as a paradox. Zookman has a tax. What have you got to raise to a podcast? Well, we've got we've got Alistair Campbell's concept of perseverance. We do have that. We do have that. Thank you so much for reminding me. Anyway, there we are. Thank you, Gabrielle. And I thought he's very, very short pitch in French was in a way more compelling and certainly true. And it was certainly much more elegant. All the way to the next one. Hello, this is Saul David and Roger Moore House from the Bat grand podcast and we're here to tell you about an exciting new strand. We're bringing out every Wednesday the big picture. Yeah, there's a lot going on in the world at the moment as we know Ukraine which we cover every week but also sort of wider developments as well. So we wanted to have a section where we did interviews with high ranking individuals, people who can illustrate and inform us of that wider world. Yeah, we all get a fog of information and comment and we want to cut through that to give some real insight about the conflicts and geopolitics that are affecting our world today and we've got a pretty stellar line up to begin with. Haven't we Roger? Yeah, I'm just prepping now for an interview with Radik Shikorsky, the Polish foreign minister. Poland's very much a big strategic player now in Europe with the Ukraine War as well. So he'll be a fascinating interview. Who have you been speaking to? Yeah, well this morning I spoke to Al-Khan's soldier-ten politician who until recently was ministerial. of armed forces but resigned on a matter of principle because he felt the government wasn't committing enough money to keep Britain safe in the years and decades to come and he had some really fascinating things to say. So do listen out for the big picture every Wednesday and also on Friday when we'll be covering the latest from the Ukraine war and it's things are really hotting up there at the moment to find out more search for battleground wherever you get your podcasts.