3 Quotes by Emmanuel Saez

Development is not primarily a matter of mechanically collecting taxes to fund spending, no matter how useful this spending may be. Development is about building trust in institutions, including, most importantly, governments. When governments take more from the poor than from the wealthy, sustained trust becomes impossible.

These knottier questions have led some observers to suggest that national account statistics (and therefore our distributional national accounts) underestimate growth. More or less everyone who’s been involved at a high level in economic policymaking over the last decades, or an influential figure in the new economy, says it.

In these pages, we have made propositions to meet those challenges: a sharply progressive wealth tax to curb the forms of rent extraction associated with extreme and entrenched wealth, an effective taxation of globe-straddling companies to reconcile globalization with tax justice, a national income tax to fund the modern social state and alleviate the crushing cost of health care.