Like Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman is a French economist who promotes economically destructive class-warfare tax policy.
He’s also infamous for dodgy data manipulation, as Phil Magness explains in this Reason discussion.
The interview lasts for 64 minutes, and I recommend the entire discussion.
Yes, that’s a lot of time, but Phil has encyclopedic knowledge and is very good about avoiding jargon. so you don’t need to be an economist to understand what he is saying.
The bottom line is that Zucman and his class-warfare compatriots are pushing bad policy using bad data.
But there are people who are even more dishonest.
Including the President of the United States. Biden actually claims that upper-income taxpayers only pay an effective tax rate of about 8 percent. I debunked that nonsensical assertion two years ago.
And I recycled that column in a tweet this morning.
You may be wondering how Biden justifies using a number that not even Zucman has been willing to use.
Well, it’s because his aides decided to concoct a tax rate that arbitrarily included changes in net wealth as part of income. A make-believe number sort of based on how much government would grab with a wealth tax.
Which tell you everything you need to know about the quality and honesty of Biden’s class–warfare tax agenda.
