How billionaires get away with paying less tax than you

The News Agents

Global

Government, News, Daily News, Politics

4.1 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

As billionaire wealth soars to unprecedented heights, calls to “tax the rich” are getting louder across the world. But while politicians on the left often champion wealth taxes, governments have repeatedly struggled to make them work in practice. So why have they failed? And could that finally be changing?

This Friday, Lewis is joined by French economist Gabriel Zucman, the architect of the so-called “Zucman Tax” and one of the most influential voices in the global debate on inequality. Drawing on his new book We Need to Tax Billionaires, Zucman explains how extreme wealth has created what some see as two separate economic realities: ordinary citizens on one side, and a billionaire class operating on an entirely different political and financial plane on the other.

From private jets to ballooning fortunes, why have traditional tax systems have struggled to keep up? And could a coordinated global approach to taxing billionaires reshape democracy itself?

The News Agents is a Global Production.

The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.
0:09.4	This is a global player original podcast.
0:12.7	The minimum tax for the super rich has to be expressed as a fraction of their wealth.
0:17.0	The tax problem makes a problem worse because while the rest of us are paying large
0:22.1	amounts of taxes or large proportion of our taxes in the income, these people are not paying
0:26.5	much or, if anything. This is not to say that we can fix all the problems of the world just with
0:33.1	taxing billionaires. If all of France's billionaires would would flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow,
0:38.3	the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificant.
0:41.3	Finding question of the 21st century, meaning this battle between oligarchic forces on the one hand and
0:47.3	democratic forces on the other hand.
0:50.3	We need to tax the billionaires. You hear it all the time.
0:53.3	Around the world, the populist left, others too argue there are two economic worlds, them and us. Not just the rich, but the super, super rich. The haves and the have yachts. There can be no doubt in some ways that we are living in a new gilded age where the billionaires live on an almost
1:12.3	different political and economic plane, a private jet, no doubt. Here's a stat. The 2024
1:18.4	UBS billionaire ambitions report found that global billionaire wealth rose from about 6.3 trillion
1:26.2	in 2015 to 14 trillion in 2024, an increase of roughly
1:31.3	121% in less than a decade. And it is wealth, which begets wealth, to such an extent that
1:40.1	no one else can ever hope to catch up. Now, the left often talks the talk on wealth taxes.
1:45.8	We've heard it from West Streeting and Andy Burnham just this week. Governments, though, have a
1:51.0	patry record of carrying them out. Where they've been tried, they've largely failed. So enter
1:56.8	Gabriel Zuckman. He's a French economist and is currently the toast of the left across the world
2:02.7	for doing the thinking for how a new tax on billionaires might actually work. Indeed, it's been
2:09.3	named after him, the Zuckman Tax. His new book, We Need to Tax, Billionaires, has just been published
	...

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