The Paris-to-Sacramento Pipeline: How Three Economists Built a Blueprint for Taking Your Stuff
A coordinated agenda to impoverish rich countries and keep poor countries poor in plain sight
There is a pattern that’s worth naming. Over the past several years, three French economists — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman — have together produced a body of work that functions less like independent scholarship and more like a coordinated legislative program. Understand the logic of each piece, and the larger design becomes visible: a vast wealth-tax net drawn tight enough that no one can escape it, not by moving to Nevada, not by renouncing citizenship, not by relocating a business. Global, compulsory, enforced. For what goal? To level countries down.
They have told you that this is the goal. Believe them.
Sacramento First
Building on past work that they have done with Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both Berkeley economists and longtime collaborators, co-authored a recent NBER working paper with Jasper Boll documenting California billionaire wealth and making the affirmative case for the state’s proposed one-time 5% wealth tax. This particular paper is a response to the Hoover Institution’s Joshua Rauh and coauthors showing that earlier revenue projections by Saez for the wealth tax are, well, bunk.
It’s worth noting that Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have been repeatedly caught by economists across the political spectrum, including Obama’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, inflating wealth-concentration figures, using nonstandard methods to manufacture desired, errors, and in at least one case quietly scrubbing prior data from the internet when new numbers told a more convenient story. Their work is less a research program than policy advocacy dressed up in academic clothing.
In this case, their paper argues that the California billionaire wealth tax could raise around $100 billion, and that mobility responses would be manageable. But Josh Rauh has run the same numbers and arrived at a sharply different conclusion. Jack Salmon and I have written about this matter in the past, but here is the basic problem with the Saez-Zucman projections: they counted billionaires who had already left. Larry Ellison departed California in 2020. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left before the proposed liability date of January 1, 2026. These departures were public record. Yet the Berkeley paper’s $100 billion figure does not adequately account for a tax base that was already walking out the door before the vote was cast.
Rauh’s team found that those confirmed departures alone reduce projected revenues by nearly 40% before a single dollar is collected. Apply the mobility elasticities that the academic literature actually supports. Factor in the future California income taxes permanently foregone from departed taxpayers, and the tax produces a net present value loss to the state of at least $25 billion.
These economists should know better, because the French government has already run this experiment. Encouraged by Piketty and Zucman, France tried to tax the very rich. From Fortune: from 2000 to 2017, around 60,000 millionaires chose to leave the country. The revenue collection took a hit. France largely repealed its wealth tax in 2018.
The pattern repeats itself in Washington state, where the story is unfolding in real time. That state’s new 9.9% millionaire’s tax does not take effect until 2028, yet it has already triggered a wave of departures. Rich Barton, co-founder of Zillow, recently announced he is now a resident of Las Vegas. In 2023, Jeff Bezos left for Miami. Howard Schultz decamped to Florida. Starbucks has been expanding its corporate footprint in Tennessee. Former Starbucks CEO Schultz wrote that his decision to leave “had much to do with family choices and my stage of life,” and then spent the rest of his op-ed explaining exactly how hostile Washington’s political class has become to business.
Governor Bob Ferguson’s own Office of Financial Management has now sent a letter to state agencies acknowledging “significant budget shortfalls” and warning them explicitly: do not assume the millionaire’s tax revenue will materialize, because the law faces a court challenge, potential ballot measures, and deep uncertainty.
But what the disagreement obscures is something more basic: even granting Saez and Zucman their best-case revenue scenario, the California wealth-tax’s own logic predicts the problem it cannot solve. Billionaires are mobile. The wealthier they are, the more mobile. California cannot wall them in. And Saez and Zucman know this perfectly well.
Which is why Zucman has spent years building the cage.
The Global Backstop
In June 2024, Zucman published a blueprint commissioned by the Brazilian G20 presidency: a coordinated international minimum tax on billionaires, set at 2% of wealth annually, designed to raise $200–250 billion per year from roughly 3,000 taxpayers globally. The pretense is that these guys aren’t paying their fair share. He gets there, as he does in the case of California, by making questionable claims. But at the very least he is clear about the point of this effort. Prevent high income earners from voting with their feet in response to local, state and federal wealth and income taxes.
His own words: “A common challenge with increasing the taxation of ultra-high-net-worth individuals is the international mobility of the taxpayers involved.” The entire architecture of international coordination, the information exchange requirements, the “undertaxed payments rules” modeled on the OECD’s corporate minimum tax, the provisions for taxing former residents of participating countries for years after they depart, exists for one reason: to ensure there is nowhere left to go.
This latest paper even contemplates taxing billionaires based not on where they live, but on where their companies have assets or employees. If a U.S. billionaire moves to Dubai, and his companies have operations in France and Germany, France and Germany would be authorized to collect a share of the wealth tax. His companies could be made liable if he refuses. This is not a revenue-raising exercise with some mobility concerns attached. It is a mobility-suppression exercise with revenue attached.
The sequencing matters. Saez and Zucman push the California wealth tax knowing full well that billionaires will leave. Zucman simultaneously builds the intellectual and policy case for why that flight is exactly the problem requiring an international solution. The California tax creates the political demand for the federal response; the federal response creates the demand for the international one. Each step makes the next step feel necessary.
And Then There Is Piketty
Thomas Piketty’s recent contribution is the most revealing and the least encumbered by pretense. All these wealth and income taxes proposed over the years are really meant to achieve a degrowth agenda and make everyone poorer. That’s the plan.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the comprehensive global economic restructuring program released in June 2026 by Piketty and his team. It is presented as designed to kill two birds with one stone: fix the climate and end global inequality, but what it is really doing is establishing some world governmental organizing aimed at making rich countries poorer. It would do that by capping their GDP per capita at roughly $69,000 (the US is currently at $94k), limit global economic growth to between 0 and 0.5% annually, mandate a three-day work week, reduce construction activity by 70%, manufacturing by 87%, and fund a “Global Justice Fund” through international wealth and income taxes administered by a new supranational bureaucracy answerable to no existing democratic institution.
This is actually a description of what he is proposing.
Piketty assumes vast stocks of billionaire wealth available for redistribution while simultaneously projecting near-zero long-term growth. But wealth is not a static pile. It is the capitalized present value of expected future returns. Destroy growth, and you destroy the very asset base you planned to tax.
There is a second contradiction. The plan is supposed to lift up sub-Saharan Africa. How does a region grow at 4% annually once the wealthy countries and companies currently buying its exports and financing its development have been deliberately contracted? Through the Global Justice Fund, you may say, the same fund that was depleted because the degrowth plan destroyed the value of the assets that were supposed to fund it.
Worse still is the climate baseline. It relies on a 4.5 percent warming scenario. It is very close to the RCP 8.5 scenario, warming of approximately 4.8°C by 2100, which the scientists who built that scenario officially retired it in May 2026 as implausible, with the updated central projection closer to 3°C. Recently Piketty responded to critics like me on X who pointed out that fact by saying his team is not using the RCP8.5 scenario but their own modeling framework. But that’s hardly an argument for why it is justified to continue using such alarming numbers when scientists themselves are dropping them.
This proposal is not just happening on the tail of excellent news about climate; it is happening as “global inequality is at his lowest level in nearly 150 years”, points out Felix Salmon. It is also happening at the time when we have much empirical evidence that the best way to lift people out of poverty is growth, and, that economic prosperity is also really good for the environment. Also, economic growth is compatible with declining resources use.
On the other hand, phil Magness is correct that, “”Degrowth Economics” is the exact type of policy regime that will lead to poverty, famine, malnutrition, disease, and an immiserating decline in worldwide living standards.”
Let’s sum this up: Here we have a plan to force the global economy into managed contraction, making rich countries deliberately poorer, justified by a climate scenario its own authors’ preferred scientific authority has disavowed, at the time when global inequality is the lowest it’s been. When all justifications disappear you are left with what is really the point of this exercise: Making rich countries poor, in part with wealth and income taxes and big government. That’s it. That’s the plan. It is the plan in California. It is the plan of those arguing for the federal wealth tax in the US, France and elsewhere. It is the plan of those arguing for a global wealth tax.
It is the plan and they are open about it. Please believe them.