“Economists are beginning to realize the unsustainable nature of the current social and fiscal model”

Rlet us rejoice: the American Economic Association (AEA), the main professional organization of economists in the United States, has just awarded the Clark Medal to Gabriel Zucman for his work on the concentration of wealth and tax evasion. Awarded each year to a laureate under the age of 40, the distinction notably rewards innovative work demonstrating the considerable importance of tax evasion by the richest, including in the Scandinavian countries, which are quickly considered models of virtue. . Endowed with an immense capacity for work, a rare attention to detail and an unparalleled talent for unearthing new data and making them speak, Gabriel Zucman also revealed the unsuspected extent of the circumvention of tax on companies by multinationals from all countries.

Today director of the European Observatory of Taxation, he devotes the same energy to finding solutions to the ills he documents. In one of his first reports, the Observatory has thus demonstrated that the Member States of the European Union could choose to go further than the minimum rate of 15% set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (too low and largely circumventable), without expect unanimity. By imposing on each multinational wishing to export goods and services a rate of 25% on its profits – the same as that paid by producers established on national territory – then France would obtain additional revenue of 26 billion euros and encourage other countries to do the same.

The fact that the AEA chooses to reward this work is important, because it shows that the heart of the profession is beginning to realize the unsustainability of the current social and fiscal model. Let’s not overstate it: economists have always been less monolithic than one sometimes imagines, including in the United States. In 1919, the president of the AEA, Irving Fisher, chose to dedicate his presidential address » to the issue of inequality. He explains bluntly to his colleagues that the growing concentration of wealth is on the way to becoming the main economic problem of America, which risks, if we are not careful, to become as unequal as old Europe (then perceived as oligarchic and contrary to the American spirit). Fisher is bewildered by the estimates published in 1915 by Willford King indicating that “2% of the population owns more than 50% of the wealth”and “two-thirds of the population own almost nothing”which appears to him as “an undemocratic distribution of wealth” threatening the very foundations of American society.

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