Emmanuel Saez > Quotes

“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.”
― Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

“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.”
― Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

“The explosive cocktail that is undermining America’s system of taxation is simple: capital income, in varying degrees, is becoming tax-free.”
― Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

“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.”
― Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

“In need of a Copernican revolution, we've been busy refining the Ptolemaic model of heavens.”
― Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

“This line of defense is still at the core of today’s tax-dodging industry. But it was wrong when J. P. Morgan advanced it and it is wrong now. Why? Because the law of the United States—like that of most other countries—contains a set of provisions, known as the economic substance doctrine, that make illegal any transaction that has no other purpose than a reduction of tax liability.”
― Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay