Just the headline tells the entire story. From the Washington Examiner:
Two French economists from Berkeley advise Warren and Sanders on wealth tax
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have the same two outside advisers to thank for shaping their wealth tax proposals: University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
Each Democratic presidential candidate wants to tackle wealth inequality by raising trillions of dollars in revenue from taxing the wealth — in addition to the income — of millionaires and billionaires, an idea that is backed up by research from Saez and Zucman.
There are competing explanations for the rise in inequality. Those on one side argue that wealth concentration is natural as a result of globalization, technology gains, and economic growth, which give enormous rewards to the smartest, innovative, and most hardworking people. Drastically increasing tax rates, they say, would discourage innovation and hurt the economy.
The other camp sees rising inequality as unfair, immoral, and a threat to society.
Ahhhh - Karl Marx's big fuckup. Marx thought that the pool of money was fixed and that the worlds problems came from an unequal distribution. Stupid stupid stupid. Money is fungible. It can be created. It can be destroyed. Look at the Bear Stearns collapse of 2008 - many billions of dollars lost into thin air. Where were the trucks? The money vanished. Look at the case of this British woman - created a multi-billion dollar enterprise out of thin air. Money was created.
And of course, the fruit does not fall far from the tree:
Saez, 46, and Zucman, 32, are both originally from France and have each worked in the past with Thomas Piketty, the famous French economist whose research on wealth and income inequality made him a best-selling author. By using new sources of data, such as individual tax records, Piketty reshaped the debate about inequality and wealth taxes. Piketty's central argument in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, is that inequality is a central feature of capitalism and, if not checked, could rise inexorably.
In the United States, Saez and Zucman have assumed the mantle of leading exponents of Piketty-style economic policies. The pair have researched tax havens, the government’s lack of taxation of wealth, and how those factors affect wealth distribution overall.
Classic case of GIGO - Garbage in, garbage out. Failed Marxist theories, failed practical analyses.
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