Thread by @JustinWolfers

The discussion about wealth taxes (and Saez-Zucman) at #BPEA is both incredibly rich and productive.

Makes me realize how lucky we are to have smart public finance economists battling over these ideas and policies.

Hug a public finance economist; we need them.

My sense of the #BPEA room is that the reflexive response of many economists is to see the problems with a wealth tax. But equally, there's something pretty amazing about the audacity of the Saez-Zucman vision, which would transform the role of the wealthy in society.

One economist argued that there's not much of an "economic" justification for the Saez-Zucman wealth tax. By "economic", they meant no purely positive argument.

But Saez & Zucman are admirably clear that they're starting with a set of normative concerns.

Indeed, Saez opened by expressing a concern about "oligarchic drift," which struck me as a lovely turn of phrase. #BPEA

Whatever your views of the wealth tax, it's not often that you see academic economists drive the policy debate quite as robustly as Saez, @gabriel_zucman, and @PikettyLeMonde have done across a broad research program.

It's a helluva time to be an economist...

@gabriel_zucman @PikettyLeMonde ...but it's all for naught if it doesn't lead to better outcomes.

I'm glad there's a serious and robust debate -- grounded in evidence -- and am hopeful that it'll lead to a better and fairer tax system.