I am generally in favor of the policies that Gabriel Zucman proposes. Today, he and Emmanuel Saez wrote a guest essay (see also archive.ph) for The NY Times arguing in favor of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax. My first thoughts are that this would be a good tax. Zucman helped to create taxjusticenow.org in 2019, which shows historical tax rates for the US, and models the impact of wealth and other taxes on current tax rates (see figure below).

I think taxjusticenow.org is a wonderful site. Even so, it only shows data up to 2018, and doesn’t show tax rates in any other countries. I contacted Zucman, and offered to pay for creation of a new site or page that has similar data to taxjusticenow.org, but was up-to-date, and included European countries. Zucman said it would require $500k, and I agreed and made a payment in the form of a donation. Since then I have not received a single email from Zucman that was not initiated by me, and when I asked for an update, he pointed me towards a site focused on France that does not include any other countries or any historical data (In the same email he pointed out that he was ranked #15 on Politico’s “Class of 2026“). Rather than give more details I’ll summarize simply: Zucman has not delivered on what he said he’d do.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he laughed and said “So you’re saying a socialist said he’d do something and then didn’t deliver?” Even if I don’t consider the policies I support to be socialist, it often seems like there’s something to this. The Democrats seem to me to talk about good policies, but in the past 40 years they allowed economic inequality to increase; they didn’t deliver. How do we get politicians to deliver on policies that lower economic inequality rather than focus on their image? I don’t think donations to politicians and pundits like Zucman are the right choice, but am not sure what to do.