America's Tax System Is Broken
3/24/20261 hr 5 min
If you're a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today, "largely optional." Countries around the world struggle to get billionaires to pay a higher tax rate than middle-income families. Gabriel Zucman is one of the world's leading experts on tax inequality, the economist who first rigorously measured what U.S. billionaires actually pay—and he found that it's less, as a share of income, than what a middle-class American pays. He's advised Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on wealth tax proposals and recently published sweeping new research showing that the problem is global. Today, we get into the mechanics of billionaire tax avoidance, the history of failed wealth taxes, and whether the AI era is about to make all of this dramatically worse. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Gabriel Zucman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsDerek Thompson· Host0:05
This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a seventy-five dollar sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. You and I are living through the greatest wealth creation moment in human history. The AI boom is minting billionaires at a pace that makes the Gilded Age look modest. Elon Musk could easily be worth half a trillion dollars or more by the end of the next few years. And yet the people accumulating this wealth are, in many cases, paying lower tax rates than their secretaries or their plumbers. There is a value-based question here to ask, like, is this fair? But there's also a practical question to ask. Is there anything we can do about it? Let's start with values. The US encourages people to build wealth by starting companies, taking risks, and making things people want. I think those are good things, and we often celebrate these stories. Setting