[Ruphin]

The effective tax rates on high income individuals is likely much less. There is a large correlation between income and wealth, and wealth increase through asset appreciation is largely not taxed, or at best taxed at much more favorable rates than general income tax.

Tax on income is not the problem, it's tax on wealth gained through asset value increase.

[bwb]

That is why you have capital gains, which is ~30% in France.

Investment income is flat taxed.

And inheritance taxes, which are very high in France.

If you want to increase taxes, consider taxing income more and capital gains at a progressive rate. Although I haven't seen good data on effects of say a 70% capital gain tax, might hurt th,e economy. I did some reading on this subject last month and the sweetspot was around 20% to 35% on that classification of income.

Do you want to take people's wealth and cap it? IE, nobody is allowed more than $5 million? What are you advocating for instead?

[verzali]

I think the proposal from the left is a 2% wealth tax annually on wealth above €100 million. I suppose that is what they are referring to.

[bwb]

First, wealth tax doesn't work because it requires a ton of work to decide what constitutes "wealth," and then you have to carve out so much crap. The only wealth tax that currently works well is on real estate, as it doesn't move, and the state already taxes that.

For example, how do you tax a private business? In Spain, for example, it is a big carve-out, which leads to people never selling a company, which hurts their economy as you have tons of zombie companies. Or what people do is they take their money and buy apartments and rent them out on Airbnb, wrap them in a business, and get around the wealth tax.

The most effective way to tax wealth is to tax income, capital gains, and inheritance effectively.

But, lets say you can wave a magic wand and tax wealth (France already taxes real estate with a wealth tax + property tax).

What would a 2% yearly wealth tax raise? Maybe 15 to 25 billion a year in France, so it does nothing.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the proposal from the left is a 2% wealth tax annually on wealth above €100 million

Would this actually cover France's deficit?

[bwb]

No, it is estimated that would only raise 15 to 25 billion.

And people will just move, or move it around.

France already has a wealth tax on real estate + property taxes.

[logicchains]

Total French private wealth is around $15 trillion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_pri... ), French government spending is around $1.8 trillion/year. Even if the French government were to expropriate the entirety of private wealth, it wouldn't even be enough to cover 10 years of spending. Fundamentally the French economy isn't producing enough to support the current level of spending, due to a continuously falling ratio of workers to retirees.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Even if the French government were to expropriate the entirety of private wealth, it wouldn't even be enough to cover 10 years of spending

America's $6.75tn budget [1] would blow through our $140tn private wealth in 21 years. Even Norways $0.11tn budget [2] blows through its $1.6tn of private wealth in 14 years.

Perhaps the better metric is deficit as a fraction of private wealth? If that looks unsustainable, the problem is in publicly-held assets and services.

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_budget_of_Norway

[ta1243]

French private wealth has increased $2,300 billion since 2020 according to that page.

In the last 5 years French public debt has grown $750b [1]

Had that growth in wealth been taxed at the rate income was taxed (45%), that would have seen France's debt decrease - even with the covid mess.

[1] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/national-govern...