Thank you. Thank you so much. Such a great pleasure to be with you today, to be back at LSE after all these years. I have so many wonderful memories of my stay there, and so it's a very great honor and personal pleasure to be here. So I want to start with what is perhaps one of the most striking and most important evolutions of the world economy of the last decades, which has been the explosion of extreme wealth.
It's a phenomenon that started in the 1980s, that has accelerated after the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and now there's an acceleration of the acceleration, if you want, over the last couple of years. The graph shows the amount of wealth that's owned by global billionaires according to Forbes magazine, starting in 1987, relative to world GDP. So today you have about 3,000 billionaires according to Forbes. In reality, probably more than that, but that's those that they keep track of. And in 1987, this group of the world population owned in wealth the equivalent of 3% of world GDP. Okay? Meaning, if they had spent all their wealth in 1987, they would have been able to buy the equivalent of 3% of the value of all the goods and services produced globally that year. Okay?
Today, it's 17%. So we're talking about 3,000 families who, if they spent their wealth, could buy 17% of all the goods and services that are produced in a given year today. So why does that matter? This matters because with the upsurge of billionaire wealth, there's been an upsurge of their influence and of their power. And frankly, a lot of what's happening in our democracies today is downstream from the explosion of billionaire influence. And that's for a very simple reason. It's just because wealth, for most people, wealth is a good thing, right? For the middle class, it's owning your home. It's retirement assets for your old age. So we'd like to encourage wealth accumulation by the middle class. We'd like the working class to have access to wealth. It's largely excluded from property ownership still today. Its total wealth for the bottom 50% of the distribution is still above zero. Their assets are about as large as their debts. We'd like more wealth for most of society. Wealth is a good thing.
But for the billionaires, of course, wealth is not safety. They're not accumulating billions for their old age. Wealth is power. And extreme wealth is always an extreme power. It's always the power to influence the prevailing ideology by buying newspapers, media, TV channels, radio stations. It's the power to influence markets by buying competitors in particular. It's the power to influence policymaking. It's the power to influence elections, to buy elections. And there's always in all democratic societies a fundamental tension between extreme wealth on the one hand and the very possibility of a well-functioning democracy on the other hand. It's something that all the thinkers of democracy have written about, all the way back to Aristotle and through to, you know, the founding fathers of the US and today someone like Leip here at the London School of Economics. All the thinkers of democracy have highlighted this fundamental tension. And so that's why what's happening, what we can see in that chart here, matters not only from a purely economic perspective but more broadly for the future of our democracies.
Now, that was relatively well known, but what was not well known until very recently was how much tax the super rich pay. There's a lot of opacity about that. Our public statistics are silent about this issue, about the wealth of the super rich, the income they earn, or the taxes that they pay. There's just no public data about that, and it's only relatively recently that this opacity has started to dissipate thanks to a new international research effort. And this is kind of the story that I tell in the very short book. You know, it's telling the story of this new research which started in 2019 when, with Emmanuel Saez, we did the first study of how much tax the billionaires pay and how we can compare that to the effective tax rates of the rest of the population. And no, the study had all sorts of limitations. We did not have access to all the data. But the main merit is that it encouraged different teams of researchers in different countries to do the same in their own country. And so now we have very good studies for France, for the Netherlands, for Italy, for Norway, Sweden, Brazil, and more countries, about a dozen countries now, where economists were able to partner with tax administrations to dissipate this opacity.
So essentially, to link businesses to their owners, to be able to measure the true income of the very rich, and their income is mostly profits from companies that they own. Hence why it's so important to know what companies they own and how much tax they pay directly and indirectly through the corporations that they own. And so it makes it possible to compute total effective tax rates for the very rich that are comparable to those of the rest of the population. There's a long tradition in public finance of trying to estimate the distribution of taxes that goes back to the 1940s, a book by two economists in the US, Gabriel and Helen Taussig, "Who Pays the Taxes?", the first attempt at measuring how effective tax rates vary across the distribution. But those studies were silent about the super rich. And so now, if we try to kind of continue this research agenda, here is how the picture looks like.
So on the x-axis you have the different groups of the population. P0-10 is the 10% of adults with the lowest income. P10-20 is the next decile, and so on. And you have a zoom all the way up to dollar billionaires, who are both at the top of the wealth distribution and at the top of the income distribution. And then on the y-axis you have their total effective tax rate. What does it mean? It means the total taxes that they pay, all taxes included, VAT, other consumption taxes, payroll taxes, income tax, corporate taxes allocated to the owners of the corresponding corporations, everything divided by their total income. Okay? So that's the most comprehensive and comparable and consistent measure of tax burdens that you can think of.
And so here's what you see. So first of all, you see that in all these countries, the working class, let's forget about the US for a second. I'll get back to the very specific US case in a second, but let's look at the European countries on the chart. You see that the working class pays about 40%, defined as the bottom 50% of the distribution, pays around 40-45% of their income in taxes. So contrary to a widely held view, low-income people, they do pay a lot of taxes. They do pay VAT, they do pay consumption taxes, they pay payroll taxes, and so on. Then it rises a little bit for the middle class. Then again it rises perhaps a little bit for the upper middle class. So there is some very mild progressivity in taxation, and then there's kind of a collapse, a total collapse of effective tax rates all the way down to 15 to 25% for billionaires.
And so here you have what is, in my view, a grave anomaly. A grave anomaly because, of course, there's 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 okay to disagree, and, you know, more right-wing people will want less progressivity, more left-wing people will want more progressivity. It will always be a central topic of debate, of political conflict, and that's okay. It's easy to get it wrong, to have too much, too little progressivity, that's fine. But no one, and I should stress, and I think fundamentally no one agrees with a situation where the wealthiest people in society are able to pay much less tax than the rest of the population. Just a violation of the basic principle of equality before the law, which is at the core of our democracies, of the rule of law. And equality before the law in the realm of taxation, it means equality before the tax law. The most conservative interpretation that you can make of that principle is that the tax system shouldn't be regressive. The super rich shouldn't be allowed to pay less than the rest of the population. And that's the situation we're in today, and in all these different countries with different teams of researchers applying the same methods, making things comparable everywhere, this is what you see. That's a problem.
So first question is where is the problem coming from, and the answer is that the problem is coming from the failure of the individual income tax, the progressive income tax. Its failure to effectively tax the super rich. Here it's the same chart as previously, but focusing on just this one tax, the progressive income tax. Rank people by their income, you look at their effective income tax rate, income tax divided by total income, pre-tax income. And the progressive income tax, first of all, was a big revolution, a big democratic accomplishment of the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th century, a big international movement where different countries at roughly the same time start creating their progressive income tax: 1909 in the UK, 1913 in the US, 1914 in France. And it was a big revolution.
Right? Because before that, centuries, millennia before that, taxation was based only on consumption taxes, very unfair, or on flat income tax that didn't depend on one's income. And then it changes at the beginning of the 20th century. We start taxing income progressively with higher rates for wealthier people. And you can see that, and back in the days, you know, there were huge debates about that. I'll get back to this, it was very controversial, and now it's widely accepted. And the income tax, by and large, works quite well in the sense that it's progressive indeed for most of the population, but up to some point, right? And then you can see in those different countries, past some threshold, which can be really high, you know, can be above tens of millions of pounds in wealth, very high, it can be very high, but past some threshold, the income tax rate collapses. And it collapses to really, you know, problematically low numbers in many countries, like, you know, Netherlands for billionaires, it's, you know, 0%. That's not a lot.
Uh, Norway, Sweden, Norway and Sweden is really an interesting case. We studied those countries with my colleagues, David Seim and Marius Ring, and we approached Norway and Sweden thinking, let's look at the countries that must do things right. If there's one country where they found a way to tax the rich, and there will be lessons to be drawn from these countries, it must be those Nordic countries. They're doing so many things, you know, right? And it turns out that it's almost the opposite. It's the worst. You know, in particular, you look at Sweden on the chart here, and it's in Sweden that you have the largest gap between what kind of the middle class pays in tax, 50, 55%, and what billionaires pay, which is just 14% in Sweden. Well, anyway, closing the parenthesis, the reason for that is the income tax vanishes literally for the extremely wealthy.
And why does the income tax vanish? It's because fundamentally, past a certain level of wealth, it's very easy to structure your wealth such that this wealth will generate no or no significant amount of taxable income. There was a striking illustration of that a few years ago in the US when you had revelations by the US media ProPublica on the taxes paid by US billionaires, and you saw people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk reporting very little income, paying very little in income tax. There's even one year when Bezos says, okay, look, I'm so poor that I'm going to claim family benefits. Okay? And he receives family benefits. He receives a check, a check for his children. You know, he receives money from the government instead of paying taxes. And there's nothing illegal in that. Don't get me wrong. It's not fraud. It's not tax evasion. It's perfectly legal. It's the way the income tax works. If you have found ways to pretend that you don't have income, you have no income tax to pay.
And so, as CEO of Amazon, he didn't pay himself any wage. As controlling shareholder of Amazon, he instructed Amazon to not pay out any dividends. So he had no dividend income. He didn't sell shares in Amazon. So he didn't realize any capital gains. So his taxable income was really low. He looked very poor from the perspective of the income tax law. But of course, his true income, his share of Amazon profits, Amazon is making billions, tens of billions in profit, is really high. His wealth, of course, is extremely high. So his true ability to pay taxes, no matter whether you look at true income or wealth, is really high, but our income tax systems fail to effectively tax extremely rich people like him.
And so what we've learned from the research that was conducted over the last four, five years is that the problem is not just a few isolated cases like Bezos. It's a structural problem. And what we learn is that it's in fact even worse. And I was very surprised about that. It's even worse in Europe than in the US. You can see it on the chart. I'm not here to praise US billionaires, and we can see on the chart that they don't pay a lot of tax, but still it's a bit more than the European billionaires who are really close to zero. And what's the reason for that? There's an interesting story behind all of that. The story is that, well, before I explain the story, let me explain why the European billionaires pay so little. Why they pay so little is that because they use a specific type of tax avoidance which is known as the use of personal holding companies, a bit like shell companies. So they put their wealth in holding companies, and then it's the companies themselves that earn income, mostly dividend income, and because on paper, because these are just accounting gains, it's all on paper, because on paper the income is paid not to individual persons but to companies, there's no individual income tax that's owed. And because the dividends are in fact tax-free, dividends earned by holding companies in almost all countries are free of corporate tax, of company tax, you know, they pay no individual income tax, and the holding companies themselves, they pay zero or almost zero. And so that's through those gains, you know, disconnecting themselves from their wealth, putting their wealth in holding companies, that European billionaires manage to pay so little income tax.
Now in the 1930s in the US, in 1933, the New York Times revealed that J.P. Morgan, one of the wealthiest persons of the time, had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932. And at the time the Americans, they were very upset. Okay. So you had hearings in the Senate, you had an investigation by the US Treasury, and in 1937, under the New Deal, they first of all discovered that part of the reason why people like Morgan could pay no income tax was precisely because of the use of holding companies. And second, they said, that's not normal. We're not going to allow that. And so they changed the law. They created what's known as the personal holding company tax, which is a very high tax if you use holding companies. And so essentially they shut down that specific form of tax avoidance. And so that's why in the US the billionaires pay a little bit more tax than in Europe. That's because they cannot do these paper games that involve holding companies. They cannot do it since 1937. But here, and it's true in the UK as well, just like in the EU, it's still possible and it's widespread.
Okay, so that's the reason why the billionaires pay so little. Now, to some extent, there has long been a recognition that the income tax is limited when it comes to taxing the super rich, and it's always been the main argument for having a wealth tax. Okay. And so you have many countries, you've had many countries over the course of the 20th century who have had progressive wealth taxes. And with many of our colleagues, Camille, many others, we've studied the historical experience with wealth taxation. Has it worked? Do wealth taxes, as they have existed or still exist today in countries like Norway or Switzerland or Spain, do they work well? Do they really make the rich pay their fair share? And the conclusion from that is that essentially, no, they don't work. They don't work.
And no, it's a bit shocking, but it's an argument that's often used by opponents of wealth taxation. You know, they said, we've tried wealth taxes in the past and, you know, it didn't work very well. And I agree with that. Of course, you can look at that failure and you can say, okay, we've tried those wealth taxes, they didn't really work, hence they will never work, and so let's stop thinking about that. Or you can look at that history and say, okay, let's try to learn about the mistakes that were made, are there lessons to be drawn, can we do better in the future? And of course, it's going to be the perspective that I'm going to adopt in a second. But before talking about that, why have they failed? Why are they still failing in the countries that still have them? Well, they failed because first of all, the super rich by and large have been exempted from those wealth taxes. And I tell the story of France in the book, which is a pretty shocking and frankly disturbing story, where in 1981, the Socialist Party wins the presidency, has an absolute majority in parliament, and they create a wealth tax. But then immediately, the year just after that, they say, wait a second, wait a second, are we sure we want to do that? And they start to introduce exemptions, and in particular one big exemption for so-called professional goods. They invent a notion that doesn't exist in any economics textbook of professional goods. Never heard of it before. And they say, okay, what is a professional good? Professional asset. Professional good is if you own more than 25% of the shares of a company, we're going to call that professional assets, and we're going to exclude that from the wealth tax. We're going to say that's going to be exempt from the wealth tax. But that's exactly the wealth of billionaires. That's what it means to be really rich. It's owning a lot of shares in big companies. And so, you know, you have the Socialist Party with all power in '81 who exempt billionaires from wealth taxation, the wealth tax that they themselves had just created in France. And that's the reason why if you look at the effective, you know, if you look at total taxes, income taxes and wealth taxes paid by billionaires in France relative, expressed as a fraction of their wealth in 2016, which is on the eve of the abolition of the wealth tax in France, you can see, I don't know if you can see it, but there is a black line here which is the effective wealth tax rate of billionaires in France, 0.005%.
Colossal intellectual and political failure. Create a wealth tax and the wealthiest people in the country just don't pay it. Norway does a little bit, does better, but still, and it does much better to be honest, but still the total tax rate of billionaires in Norway, income tax plus wealth tax, still adds up to only 0.4%, 4% of their wealth. That's very tiny. Okay, even with its wealth tax, you know, Norway taxes billionaires less than the US. It's not a good performance. So that's the limits of the historical experience with wealth taxation. And that's kind of the motivation for trying to think about something a bit different. Let's try to do a bit better than in the past. Let's try to learn our lessons. And so that's thinking that many of us, Camille, many others have contributed to. How can we create today an effective taxation of the super rich?
And in 2024, I tried to formulate a proposal for the G20 when Brazil had the presidency of the G20, and they wanted to put on the agenda of the G20 some new ideas for international cooperation. And so they asked us, okay, what should we do? And what I told them is, in 2021, you had 130 countries that were able to agree on a minimum tax for big multinational companies of 15%. The G20 had played a very useful role in that. And so I told them, look, I think the G20 should try to push for doing something equivalent for billionaires. No, it's the same problem as for multinationals. These are some of the main winners from globalization, but they pay very little in tax, and there should be a floor. You know, the minimum tax is a powerful tool because it targets all possible forms of tax avoidance. You don't have to specify that you're targeting this or that scheme. You're saying at the end of the day, if you're extremely rich, you have to pay at least X. And so that's the basic idea of the tax. That's really totally consensual and very simple. It's just the idea that if you're extremely rich, we can debate what it means, but I've proposed a hundred million dollars because this is where in all countries the income tax vanishes. If you're extremely rich, you should pay an unavoidable minimum each year. Okay. I think, you know, who can be against that? Who is in favor of the right of billionaires to pay zero? Absolutely no one. Okay, so that's a good start. We all agree there should be a floor.
Now, for the floor to be effective, it shouldn't be computed as a fraction of income because the whole problem is that the billionaires find ways to report no income. So, Bezos has no income. If you create a minimum tax on income, he has to pay 25% of zero, which is zero. It's brilliant. The French government did it 18 months ago. They passed a minimum tax based on income. The billionaires did not complain. Nobody heard about it. It generates no revenue, and that's, you know, that's what they did. It is not a good idea for the minimum to be effective. It has to be expressed as a fraction of wealth because wealth is much harder to manipulate.
And so then the thinking was, okay, what is the rate that everybody can agree on? Because remember, we are the G20, so, you know, you can't be extremely ambitious. The idea is to put something on the table that's going to be viable in a forum like that. And so the computation was, okay, what's the rate which is going to erase the regressivity that we see on that chart here, which is going to ensure that the billionaires pay as much, not even more, but as much tax related to their income than the rest of the population? And the answer, broadly speaking, is 2%. Okay? So if you create a minimum tax for people with more than 100 million dollars in wealth equal to 2% of their wealth, you get rid of this anomaly that the research has highlighted.
So that's a proposal, that's the proposal in the G20 report. That's the proposal that I detail in the book, and that's the proposal that was adopted by the French National Assembly last year in February of 2025, and it was blocked by the Senate. And so it's not yet enacted into law in France, but it's going to come back in the debate very soon. And we see similar initiatives that are bubbling up in Belgium, in the Netherlands, perhaps soon in Spain, perhaps soon, I hope, I'm going to talk about the UK in a second, perhaps soon in this country.
And there are three reasons why we need it. Number one is just equality before the law. Let's get rid of the anomaly. So what the chart shows here is if you have this 2% minimum tax, that's how our tax systems would look like. You know, instead of effective tax rate of the very rich falling to about 20%, they would pay as much, broadly speaking, as the middle class. It's not, you know, as anyone can see, it's not very ambitious, but we can all agree on that. We have to reaffirm the principle that if you're extremely wealthy, you cannot live in some parallel society. You have to contribute like the rest of the population. You become really rich, it's in, you know, in large part because you've benefited from public spending, infrastructure, and education, sometimes subsidies. And so, you know, it makes it even more unacceptable that you should be allowed to pay less than the rest of the population. So with 2% you get rid of that anomaly. So that's number one.
But the second reason is the sheer amount of tax revenue at stake today. Because in the 1980s, 1990s, before the explosion of billionaire wealth, you could say, well, okay, perhaps they don't pay a lot of tax, but they're so few in number that, you know, we don't care. You know, who cares? There's not a lot of money at stake. Now, that's not true anymore. Now, there's a lot of money at stake. So now if you take the data from the Sunday Times Rich List, data that was compiled by Philip Beresford here, first year of the ranking is 1989, the 200 wealthiest families in 1989. So the 0.001%, 0.01% richest people in the UK, they owned in wealth the equivalent of 5% of UK GDP. Okay, so it means if you tax that at 2%, you get 2% times 5%, you get 0.1% of GDP in additional tax revenue. You can say, no, not a big deal if you only care about public finances, right? Forgetting about inequality, forgetting about equality before the law.
But then something happened in the UK, like everywhere else in the world, the wealth, and here it's just looking at the wealth of resident billionaires. No, removing those who don't live in the UK. Just focus on those 200 resident billionaires. Well, they own more than 700 billion pounds today, and they own in wealth the equivalent of 20% of UK GDP. Now, if you add also the wealth of those between 100 million and 700 million, you can estimate that ballpark number, conservative estimate, the wealth of the roughly 1,000 families who have more than 100 million pounds in the UK adds up to the equivalent of 25%, perhaps 30% of UK GDP. Okay? So now if you tax that only at 2%, we're talking about 0.5%, 0.6% of GDP in additional tax revenue. We're talking about 15 billion, 20 billion pounds per year, per year in additional tax revenue from 1,000 extremely wealthy undertaxed families.
So now even if you don't care about inequality at all, but just you want to balance the books, you want to have a budget that works, you have to care deeply about that question. I'm not saying it's going to solve the public finance problems of the country, but it's also very difficult to see how we can solve our public finance problems in the UK or in France as long as we don't tackle that problem. No, the sheer amount of revenue at stake now is really large.
And so of course then there is the bigger issue. Of course the bigger issue is the issue of democracy. And moving back for a second to the case of the US, where the trends of course are the most striking and the most worrying. If you try to kind of visualize in some sense the oligarchic drift of the US, I think that's the clearest chart. It's focusing just on the really very top, you know, the top 0.00001%, 0.01%, which is 19 households today, four households in 1913. The advantage of looking at the very, very top is that you can go back to 1850 because you always have rankings of the super, super rich. So back to the middle of the 19th century. So you can see the US had its famous Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, with the big monopolists of the time accumulating enormous fortunes, you know, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and so on and so on. But what's happening, you know, it really pales in comparison to what's happening today, where the wealth of oligarchs today is equivalent to 14% of US national income as opposed to 4% at the peak of the Gilded Age.
And you see the kind of vertical increase that's happening, you know, over the last few years. And of course we all see how that wealth translates into enormous political power with, you know, someone like Musk who could have a cabinet position, plugged on the servers of the federal government with total freedom to slash federal spending that he didn't like. And that just highlights that we're at the juncture where it's becoming obvious that the battle, you know, of the 21st century is going to be that battle between oligarchic forces and democratic forces. And it's going to be a fierce battle. And I think when you look at that chart, you can say, well, it's hopeless. No, the battle has been lost. The influence of the truly wealthy is just so overwhelming that there's just no hope in changing that in any meaningful way. And I think that's not quite true. I think that's, you know, very wrong, in fact, and I'm a big believer in the power of democratic forces.
And the reason why I think there are very good reasons to be optimistic is if you look at history, and the closest historical precedent for the situation today is in many ways the movement around the birth of the progressive income tax. And it was a very fierce battle. You know, at the beginning of the 20th century, the super rich didn't pay tax, and all of a sudden you have a number of governments who say, look, no, perhaps you should pay a little bit. In the UK, it's the famous People's Budget of 1909, Lloyd George, where he says, okay, we need to fund workers' pensions, and so we are going to create a super tax of 2.5% on income for the 10,000 wealthiest people in the UK, which would come in addition to the flat regular income tax of 2% that existed since 1843. So it's the birth of the progressive income tax, and, you know, it's a huge battle, and the House of Lords vetoes the super tax, the People's Budget, which then leads to the Parliament Act of 1911 that removes the veto power of the House of Lords. So it's an epic battle, but it's a battle that eventually was won, right? The income tax, not only was the progressive income tax not only was created, but then it became extremely progressive during the course of the 20th century, with in fact in the UK rates, top marginal income tax rates that went all the way up to nearly 100% after World War II.
And it was the pillar of the modern tax system of the country, and also the pillar of what made possible the rise of the social state, the rise of the welfare state. So it was really a tremendous accomplishment. And the UK was a leader, 1909, one of the first countries to do it. France did it in 1914. The US did it in 1913. The US had to change its constitution to pass the 16th Amendment to create a federal income tax. In France, the Senate blocked the income tax for five years between 1909 and 1914. But eventually it passed.
And basically what's happening today, perhaps, you know, nobody can know for sure, but perhaps is to some extent a repetition of what happened at the beginning of the 20th century, the beginning of an international movement to complete the revolution that was the creation of the income tax, bring the super rich into the system. And so of course the question is, you know, we need one country to start doing it and to start this international movement. And the UK often leads, you know, in these issues, whether it's the progressive income tax of 1909, whether it's the creation of the welfare state in 1945, in the opposite direction, you know, whether it's the turn to neoliberalism in 1979, you know, a bit before Reagan, or the turn to nationalism with Brexit, you know, a bit before Trump. But, you know, the UK is often a bit ahead of the curve. And so I count on you to be a bit ahead of the curve again this time with a new People's Budget that will say, okay, look, the time has come, right? When we see that chart, I think we can all agree that the time has come to make sure the billionaires have to pay a minimum, a bit like Lloyd George, you know, 2.5% was really a low rate to kind of highlight the kind of selfishness of the aristocrats of the time who didn't want to pay tax. And that's a bit the same strategy with this minimum tax of 2% on wealth.
Now let me just conclude by saying, of course, the concern when one country on its own does it alone, always the debate is about, oh, but the rich are going to move, they are going to relocate to Dubai, to Monaco, and so everything you've told us, that's fine, you know, it's a nice story, but now if we were to press the button, it would be like shooting ourselves in the foot, it would be self-defeating, it would be a terrible idea.
Now, the most important thing to remember from this whole discussion is that this view is wrong, and that it's possible to address this risk, which is real, of out-migration by the very wealthy. What's really important to understand is that, you know, this tax exile, it's not a law of nature like gravity. It's a choice. We choose to tolerate it or to encourage it sometimes, or we can choose to fight it. And so how can we fight it? It's not very complicated. There are different ways to do that. The system that I would defend, that I think is most logical, is to say that if you've lived for a long time in the UK and you became really rich in the UK, and now you move to another country, then the UK should keep taxing you after you've moved as if you were still a tax resident of the UK for a number of years, five or ten or fifteen years, we can discuss, so that it would be neutral from a tax perspective to live in London or in Dubai or in Monaco, it makes no difference. The logic is unbeatable. The logic is if you've become very rich in one country, it's obviously because you've benefited from, you know, public spending. And so there's just no right once you've become very rich to secede and have no tax to pay anywhere in the world. Now, if you're, and plus, you know, you've benefited from all the knowledge that's been accumulated over centuries by all of humanity, right? So you have a debt towards humanity.
So now if you decide to move to a country that does not tax you, fine. That's their right. That's your right. You can move. That's okay. But if your new country does not tax you, then the country where you built your wealth is going to collect the taxes that your new country chooses not to collect, is going to play a role of tax collector of last resort. So that if you move to another country that taxes you as much as the UK, you don't have any extra tax to pay to the UK. But if you move to a country that does not tax you, then you will have to pay the UK taxes as if you are still living in the UK in full. So that's the system that I think makes most sense. You don't need an international agreement. Any country on its own can do it. It will remove any incentives to move for tax reasons, and so it makes it possible for any individual country to finally start taxing its billionaires. So once again, I count on you, and thank you very much.
