Economist Gabriel
Zucman presented ‘A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation
Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals’ (Gabriel Zucman, A Blueprint for
a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth
Individuals, EU Tax Observatory (2024); this proposal further develops a number
of articles authored by Zucman and several coauthors e.g., Emmanuel Saez &
Gabriel Zucman, Progressive Wealth Taxation, Brookings Papers Econ. Activity 437–511
(2019); Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman, Wealth Taxation: Lessons from
History and Recent Developments, 112 Am. Econ. Ass’n: P&P 58–62 (2022);
Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman, Rethinking Capital and
Wealth Taxation, 39 Oxford Rev. Econ. Pol’y 575–591 (2023)) at the G20 meeting
in Rio de Janeiro in June 2024. This Billionaire Tax proposal – of which Zucman
provides a brief summary in this issue of INTERTAX (Gabriel Zucman, The
Billionaire Tax: a (modest) proposal for the 21st century, INTERTAX (2025)) –
has been met with wide political and scholarly interest. In this short comment,
the author will not address the political debate on wealth and income
inequality or dwell on the practical implications of global wealth taxation in
general, i.e., on matters of administrability, compliance, and anti-avoidance
tools. Rather, this article examines the role of the Zucman tax in the context
of mainstream (individual and corporate) income taxation and highlights the
underlying tension between taxing wealth and taxing wealthy individuals’
income.