WASHINGTON (Reuters) – From 1982 to 2018 the share of U.S. wealth held by the 400 richest Americans is estimated to have grown from 1% to around 3.5%, or probably around $3 trillion.
According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the University of California at Berkeley economists who developed that estimate, that is in part because the wealthiest American families declare only a small portion of their actual economic gains in any given year as income, while leaving the rest invested in stocks and other assets, to grow in value.
Saez has been involved in a series of what are considered groundbreaking studies of U.S. income, inequality and economic mobility that involved both developing techniques to impute income based on holdings of wealth, and extensive access to U.S. Internal Revenue Service records.
He and Zucman have collaborated on several papers on the topic since 2014, and recently published “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes How to Make Them Pay.”
“The greatest injustice of the U.S. tax system today is its regressivity at the very top: billionaires in the top 400 pay less (relative to their true economic incomes) than the middle class,” the economists wrote in a September paper brook.
Their work might have been little more than a provocative read on the economics circuit, had the idea of a wealth tax not been picked up by the two progressive politicians now vying with former Vice President Joe Biden for first place in the Democratic Party’s nominating contest for the November 2020 presidential election.
Not only are Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposals remarkably similar, both proposals have been vetted by Saez and Zucman.
