America's Tax System Is Broken

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Now, are all the traitors present?
0:07.0	Let's get started, shall we?
0:10.0	From rags to riches.
0:11.0	I'm so sick of this.
0:12.0	Working like a dog and being treated worse.
0:14.0	Yorkshire to New York.
0:16.0	Or climbers, you and me.
0:17.0	A life dedicated to revenge.
0:19.0	Let's make this an occasion to remember. A woman of substance
0:23.2	on Channel 4, stream now. You and I are living through the greatest wealth creation moment in human history.
0:30.2	The AI boom is minting billionaires at a pace that makes the gilded age look modest. Elon Musk could
0:36.1	easily be worth half a trillion dollars or more by the
0:39.4	end of the next few years. And yet the people accumulating this wealth are in many cases
0:44.2	paying lower tax rates than their secretaries or their plumbers. There is a value-based
0:49.4	question here to ask, like, is this fair? But there's also a practical question to ask. Is there anything
0:56.1	we can do about it? Let's start with values. The U.S. encourages people to build wealth by starting
1:02.4	companies, taking risks, and making things people want. I think those are good things, and we
1:07.3	often celebrate these stories, setting aside owners of Fortune 500 companies.
1:12.0	When celebrities like Michael Jordan or Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, or Rihanna are announced
1:16.5	his official billionaires, the news headlines don't say, and they should feel pretty bad
1:20.5	about that.
1:21.9	We celebrate their net worth as a sign of their success.
	...

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