1Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's seminar builds directly on last week's reading about wealth concentration.
2I found Piketty's central argument fairly persuasive, but I'm still unsure whether the return on capital genuinely exceeds growth everywhere.
3That's precisely the objection that several reviewers raised; they argued his data had conflated housing wealth with genuinely productive capital.
4Initially I accepted the critics' position, though the supplementary chapters in the second edition answered most of their points.
5Shall we also compare his proposal for a global wealth tax with the more conventional progressive income taxes?
6Yes, but remember that the seminar leader explicitly asked us to focus on political feasibility rather than on theoretical elegance.
7On that point, the case study of the French wealth tax is illuminating, since most revenue forecasts proved wildly optimistic.
8Wasn't the problem there mainly capital flight, or was it in fact the administrative burden of accurately valuing private assets?
9The reading suggested valuation difficulties mattered more; flight was dramatic in the headlines but modest in aggregate numbers.
10It was not the rate of the tax but the breadth of its exemptions that ultimately undermined it.
11Let's agree, then, to structure our joint presentation around the question of feasibility, beginning with valuation and ending with enforcement.