Berkeley Talks

In this Berkeley Talks episode, economist Gabriel Zucman discusses how wealth inequality and billionaire wealth has soared in recent decades, prompting the need for a global minimum tax of 2% on billionaires. “The key benefit of a global minimum tax on billionaires is not only that it would generate substantial revenue for governments worldwide — about $250 billion a year — but also, and maybe most importantly, that it would restore a sense of fairness,” says Zucman, a UC Berkeley summer research professor and director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality’s Summer Institute. Today, billionaires pay only about 0.2% of their wealth in taxes, says Zucman, because they often structure their wealth to minimize taxable income through control over corporate dividends, delaying capital gains and using holding company structures, among other methods. The 2% tax rate proposal is a modest one, he argues, and would merely ensure that billionaires, comprising about 3,000 families around the world,