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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson
Episode: America's Tax System Is Broken
Description: If you're a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today, "largely optional." Countries around the world struggle to get billionaires to pay a higher tax rate than middle-income families.
Gabriel Zucman is one of the world's leading experts on tax inequality, the economist who first rigorously measured what U.S. billionaires actually pay—and he found that it's less, as a share of income, than what a mi...