Jeff Bezos at some point says, "No, look. Look, I'm so poor. I'm going to declare no income." He declares no income. He says, "I'm so poor that I'm going to claim family benefits."
This is Gabriel Zucman, one of the world's leading scholars on tax evasion and wealth distribution. Zucman's research shows how billionaires today are the only social group that does not pay any income tax.
Now, there's no reason to accept — I think nobody accepts and should accept — that the super rich should be allowed to pay less than the average person.
His proposal for a global minimum tax on the ultra-wealthy at a fixed rate of 2% has had a major impact on both academic research and policy development.
It should be consensual. Nobody, you know, should support less than that. Supporting less than 2% would mean being in favor of the right of billionaires to pay less.
This is not only a violation of the principle of equal taxation, but also a threat to democracy.
You are often introduced as a rockstar economist. Do you feel like a rockstar?
No. I mean, I'm a researcher. I work with many colleagues all over the world who have been doing research over the last few years to establish the facts about how much tax the billionaires pay — one of the most important elements, piece of information in any democratic society, who pays what in tax — but also an issue on which there's a lot of opacity that has just started to dissipate over the last four, five years thanks to this international research effort where people in the US, in Sweden, in Norway, in France, in the Netherlands, and in about 10 countries have worked, often in partnership with tax administration, to dissipate this opacity and finally reveal how much tax the super-rich pay. And what they found everywhere is they pay much less than the rest of the population.
And as you say, this should be a pretty fundamental fact to know how much different income groups pay in tax. Why do you think that this has been such an information gap, basically?
Yeah, it's a central piece of information in democratic societies where the government takes about 40, 50% of national income in taxes that it then spends and redistributes. And so, understanding who contributes to that, to what extent, is absolutely essential. And to be fair, there is some basic information on that, you know, it's not total opacity. What was lacking was what happens at the very top of the distribution, for the really rich. There's generally no official data on their wealth, on their income, certainly not on the taxes that they pay. That's why you have magazines that have tried to fill this gap by producing rich lists, you know, estimates of the wealth of the super-rich, but no official data. And the reason why there was no official data on that is probably that after World War II, extreme wealth had largely disappeared in many countries, especially in Europe, because of the shocks of the first half of the 20th century, in particular. And so, you know, there was just not so much money at stake. And this is what really has changed over the last couple of decades. You know, there's been an explosion of extreme wealth. It's been one of the most striking developments of the world economy. The billionaires, they used to own the equivalent of 3% of world GDP in wealth in 1987; today they have about 15% of world GDP in wealth. The rise has been particularly fast and striking in Sweden. And so now because...
And Sweden, if you look at the top 0.001% of the population, which is...
Of hundreds of individuals.
It's about 50 households, about 100 individuals. They own — in 2001, they owned about the equivalent of 5% of GDP in wealth. And today, they own about 30%.
Okay, so that means that if they spend all their money, they could buy about a third of the value of all the goods and services that are produced in a given year in Sweden. And that's a particularly fast increase, and both the level and the rise is pretty similar to what you see in a country like the US. And so, okay, now when their weight in the economy is so large, you know, 30% of GDP, it becomes really important to know, okay, do they contribute like the rest of us or no?
Mhm. And I mean, you're a professor at Berkeley, at the École Normale Supérieure. You've written several books about this, and now you're here in Stockholm presenting this book, Miljardärsskatten införas, about how to introduce a billionaire tax, a minimum tax of 2% for individuals who have a net worth at 100 million euros or more. So as you say, a couple of hundred individuals here in Sweden. So not even the richest 1%, it's like the richest per mille of the 1%.
The super rich. And you've been, you know, mapping wealth and inequality, and this is not the first time you have written in previous books about this type of tax. Yet the curves point in the opposite direction, as you point out. These last 25 years, you have this extreme accumulation of wealth just in Sweden. It's a global trend; in many countries it looks the same. Why do you think that this development keeps going in the wrong direction, even though the costs of tax evasion and the inequality keep rising?
Well, of course, you know, the very rich — and that's why we should all care about that — they have a lot of power, including the power to influence policy, to influence the prevailing ideology by newspapers and media and so on. And so that's a big part of the reason why there is not a lot of change happening so far. But I have a more optimistic take, actually, on the current situation, because I think that in retrospect it's possible, perhaps likely, that we'll come to see the years 2024, 25, 26 as the turning point. In 2024, the G20 put on its agenda the question of the effective taxation of the super rich. And that was the first time ever — these G20 finance ministers, they meet several times a year, you know, the last 25 years. G7, the same thing; they had never talked about that. It exists since 1975, not once had they discussed about inequality, about tax progressivity. And that all changed in 2024 when Brazil had the presidency of the G20 and said, look, we have to discuss these issues. These are some of the most pressing questions of our time. And I worked with Brazil then; they commissioned a report to me, and that's when I proposed this idea, which is actually a new idea. It's not a very complicated and complex idea, but a new one in the sense that it's not currently implemented in any country: of having an unavoidable floor for the tax payments of the super rich. Having a minimum tax. You might think, well, you know, that's obvious, right? If you are extremely wealthy, this should come with unavoidable duties towards society, meaning a minimum tax that you have to pay each and every year. But that does not exist. And that's in this report in 2024 that I explained, okay, we should do that. We should all agree on that. Then if you want the tax to be effective, it should be expressed not as a fraction of income, because the whole problem is that the super rich find ways to report very little income, but as a fraction of wealth, which is much harder to manipulate. Hence the proposal for a minimum tax for billionaires, you know, centi-billionaires or people who have more than $100 million in net wealth, equal to 2% of their wealth.
That has started a conversation in many countries. Then right after that, in 2025, the French National Assembly voted in favor of creating a minimum tax of 2% on centimillionaires. It was blocked by the Senate, but it's going to come back very soon, and the discussion is gaining steam everywhere. You know, we see similar proposals, you know, exactly along those lines being discussed in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Spain, in the UK. In November of 2026, there is most likely going to be a referendum in California for a one-off wealth tax of 5% on Californian billionaires. If it passes, it would be the first ever tax on billionaires enacted anywhere in the world. So, I think we are at the beginning of a turning point. Now, these are battles that always take a long time. You know, it's not change that happens in just a matter of months, because even though the specific proposal that I make in the book is very modest — 2% is not a high rate, it's just ensuring that the billionaires pay as much, not even more, as I wish they did, but just as much as the rest of the population — even though it's very modest, they like the current situation where they pay essentially zero, and they find it very convenient, and they're willing to fight, you know, quite aggressively to defend their privilege. And, you know, from that perspective, that's very understandable. And historically, those types of changes, like broadening the scope of democracy, you know, bringing into national solidarity very powerful economic actors who currently live outside of society in their own parallel society, in their own bubble, you know, it's a difficult battle, actually. So, it's going to take some years.
Yeah. And it's an important separation that you make, and that explains this tax disparity: that we tax income, we don't really tax wealth. And the wealthiest, they don't take out their income as earned income. It's in stocks or maybe some in real estate. So basically, what you're saying is the tax system needs to adapt to this new reality where...
