Catherine Clifford | September 17 | CNBC
With America’s large wealth gap and the United States government’s need for revenue, new taxes need to be implemented to raise more money from the rich — and the way to do that is with a wealth tax, economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty said Thursday.
“Where we are today in the 21st century, a basic middle class life is not accessible to very large portions of America,” Stiglitz, the recipient of a Nobel Prize in Economics and a professor at Columbia University, said during a talk organized by Columbia University and French publication Le Monde.
And at the same time, the wealthiest people in the world are growing exponentially richer, often at rates faster than the economy overall, said Piketty, who is an author and a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for instance, saw his net worth surpass $200 billion in August.)
So it “makes sense to ask to this group” of wealthy people to contribute more “to the public good” via a wealth tax, Piketty said.
Originally published in CNBC. Read the full article here.