Brain Behind Wealth Tax Makes New Case for Soaking Billionaires
- Berkeley’s Zucman says richest are paying lowest tax rate
- Economist’s ideas are being embraced by Sanders and Warren
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As inequality surges, billionaires are under attack. At least some of the blame, or credit, can go to a 32-year-old University of California at Berkeley economist named Gabriel Zucman.
After helping his professor and mentor, Thomas Piketty, crunch centuries of inequality trends, Zucman used his data skills to discover the rich illegally hiding trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens. He then found large corporations legally stashing huge profits overseas. When the Paris-born Zucman moved to the U.S., he teamed up with Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez to document the ballooning wealth of the top 0.1%, which they estimated was the highest since 1929.