Gabriel Zucman told The Epoch Times he aligned himself with Mamdani since ‘we need to tax the super-rich everywhere: in New York, in Paris, all over the world.’
On Tax Day, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted a public forum with two noted economists, calling for a tax on the “super-rich.”
The same day, the three men—Mamdani, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, and French economist Gabriel Zucman—co-signed a column in British newspaper The Guardian describing inequality as a “global crisis” and demanding that billionaires pay their “fair share.”
The proposal is not new. Zucman, 39, has championed it since 2024, when he advised Brazil’s G20 presidency on a global minimum tax for billionaires. He first rose to prominence in 2019, after Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders folded his research on tax evasion into their presidential campaigns.
The measure passed the French National Assembly in early 2025 but was blocked by the conservative-majority Senate. Similar legislation is advancing in several U.S. states, and was on the agenda for April 17 and 18 in Barcelona, where Brazilian President Lula da Silva, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa are meeting Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to discuss their concerns regarding the rise of conservative parties.
The Case for the Tax
At the forum, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, called for the “implementation of a 2 percent tax on wealth across the globe” as part of a “fight for a fairer world.” Inequality, he argued, has “permeated politics through the five boroughs of our city, through our country, through the world.”
Stiglitz went further. Over “the last 25 years,” he said, “41 percent of all the increase in wealth has gone to the top 1 percent,” producing an “evisceration of the middle class” and “the growth of the oligarchy at the top.”
Zucman framed the campaign as “the beginning of an international movement to finally make the super-rich pay their fair share,” and described a confrontation between “democracy and oligarchy at the global level” as “the defining battle of the 21st century.”
Zucman, who holds dual French-American citizenship, drew a historical parallel in an interview with The Epoch Times:
“The French Revolution abolished the privilege of the aristocracy. Today we need to abolish the tax privilege of our modern aristocracy: the billionaires, who pay much less tax than everybody else,” he said.
At the forum, he urged the United States “to reconnect with its own tradition and its own history of using taxation,” citing the progressive income and estate taxes as tools that should fund public goods but also “regulate inequality” and “protect and advance democracy.” Extreme wealth, he argued, “is always an extreme power … corrosive for democratic institutions.”
A protégé of socialist economist Thomas Piketty, Zucman is one of France’s polarizing figures. Critics call him “an activist of the extremist left,” citing columns endorsing the economic programs of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union and the New Popular Front, alliances co-led by far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party, and noting that the EU Tax Observatory he directs is partly funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
“These personal attacks are simply a reflection of the fact that opponents of the measure have no good substantial argument,” he replies.
Critics: A Different Diagnosis
Nicolas Lecaussin, director of the Paris-based Institute for Economic and Fiscal Research (IREF) and co-author of the book “What Are the Rich For?” with the think tank’s president Jean-Philippe Delsol, contested both the data and the conclusions in comments to The Epoch Times. The premise that a tiny elite captures most of the wealth, he argues, is one he has heard “for decades” from economists and journalists “fixated on the top 1 percent or even the top 0.1 percent.”
The general population has grown wealthier, not poorer, he says: The share of people living on less than $3 a day fell from 43 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2025, according to the World Bank.
“The increase in the number of billionaires has coincided with the decline of poverty worldwide,” he said.
Lecaussin dismissed the symbolic weight of the 1 percent figure.
“If we want to be absurd, we could calculate how much a star footballer earns per minute on the field. It obviously means nothing,” he said.
Entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, he adds, “create countless jobs” and “have revolutionized the world,” benefiting above all the populations lifted out of poverty.
