Thomas Piketty On Income Inequality: 'We Can Do Better'

French intellectual phenomenon economist Thomas Piketty is generating headlines with his bestseller, "Capital in the Twenty-first Century."

Piketty focuses on the danger of income inequality and he's calling for an overall tax on wealth. On NPR's On Point this morning, he said:
"Wealth levels above $100 million or $1 billion seem to be rising at 6 to 7 percent per year, you know, of course a middle class family doesn't get that rate of return right now. So this creates a tendency toward excess concentration of wealth. But that doesn't mean that we want to go to full equality of wealth. Right now, the bottom half of the U.S. population owns about 2 percent of U.S. national wealth. If it was full equality it should be 50 percent. I'm not saying it should be 50 percent, I'm just saying maybe we can do better than 2 percent."