“This is a very important debate for the decades ahead. The public debt (which is much smaller than total private wealth and perhaps not really that difficult to eliminate) is not our major worry. The more urgent need is to increase our educational capital and prevent the degradation of our natural capital. This is a far more serious and difficult challenge, because climate change cannot be eliminated at the stroke of a pen (or with a tax on capital, which comes to the same thing).”

Thomas Piketty in the concluding pages of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(his 700 page plea for a progressive annual tax on
capital aimed to improve wealth distribution)