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Debate: Taxing Wealth or Taxing the Wealthy? Some Remarks on the Zucman Billionaire Tax

Wolfgang Schön

Intertax: International Tax Review2026https://doi.org/10.54648/taxi2026006article
ABDC C
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

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.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.54648/taxi2026006

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@article{wolfgang2026,
  title        = {{Debate: Taxing Wealth or Taxing the Wealthy? Some Remarks on the Zucman Billionaire Tax}},
  author       = {Wolfgang Schön},
  journal      = {Intertax: International Tax Review},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.54648/taxi2026006},
}

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.