The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay - Hardcover

Emmanuel Saez; Gabriel Zucman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1324002727 ISBN 13: 9781324002727

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019

Synopsis

Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice is a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists who revolutionised the study of inequality, demonstrate how the super-rich pay a lower tax rate than everybody else. In crystalline prose they dissect the deliberate choices and the sins of indecision that have fuelled this trend: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax-avoidance industry and, most critically, tax competition between nations. It is not too late to change course. Instead of competition, we could choose cooperation, finding ways to create a tax regime that serves universal, democratic ends. The Triumph of Injustice offers a visionary and practical reinvention of taxes for that globalised world.

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Review:

In 2018, for the first time in more than one hundred years, billionaires paid a lower tax rate than ordinary workers, crowning the dismantling of America's system of progressive taxation. In this eye-opening book, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman show that there is no iron law of economics that led us there, just many whose self-interest or misunderstanding of economics make them claim the opposite. Their radical proposal to reinvent taxation for a globalized world will become an unavoidable starting point to any intelligent conversation. --Esther Duflo, author of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

America is tired with inequality and oligarchy. Armed with eye-popping new data, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman reveal how tax injustice is fueling the oligarchic drift. But above all, they propose bold solutions to help America reconnect with its tradition of tax justice, from the taxation of extreme wealth and giant corporations to the funding of health care for all. This is a brilliantly argued book that is an essential contribution to the global economic and political debate of the twenty-first century. --Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century

The Triumph of Injustice is a groundbreaking work that uncovers a diabolical driver of America's shocking and growing inequality: unfair and regressive tax policies and a tax avoidance industry that serves the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Until we reverse this topsy-turvy regime--where ordinary workers may pay a larger share of their income than the very richest Americans--we can't hope to address our biggest social problems. Anyone who hopes for a better future for everyday Americans needs to read this book. --Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent

About the Author:

Emmanuel Saez is professor of economics and director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on tax policy and inequality from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. With Thomas Piketty, he has constructed long-run historical series of income inequality in the United States that have been widely discussed in public debate. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1999. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 2009 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His research analyzes the accumulation and distribution of wealth through global and historical perspectives. He received his PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics in 2013. He was awarded the Bernacer Prize in 2018 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019. He is the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, which has been translated into eighteen languages.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1324002727
• ISBN 13: 9781324002727
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288