France plots tax on super-rich to rearm – and Britain could be next

> income taxes will increase for high earners who cannot evade income tax

i.e., those pesky jumped-up merchants who think that $1M a year in wages entitles them to speak to us.

And who, despite what seems like limitless wealth to the lower middle class (I would know), don't have nearly enough to really influence on a major scale.

We're not getting any money from them now, so who cares if they leave.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

https://archive.is/Q0ETI

I think the US would be better off if a number of certain billionaires fled the country due to taxes.

Nearly 20 years and France is doing fine. So maybe this is a good position to double down on?

There is a flip side though. How long do the working poor tolerate billionaires?

That's from 2006 and yet, France still roars along even without the rich who were apparently so un-attached to where they lived that they'd rather ditch the country than pay their taxes.

What exactly is the argument made by all these alarmist "who will think of the the wealthy"? Tax the rich and many leave, so you don't get as much tax revenue. Don't tax the rich and you just don't get the revenue. The implication in all these seems to be "well then why not just lower taxes so then the wealthy will grace us with their presence?"

Um, because they're not paying their fair share, and the few who leave don't lead to a net loss in tax revenue/economic prosperity, that's why.

Everything in that article seems quite twisted in its presentation. Quotes like the following:

> Eric Pinchet, author of a French tax guide, estimates the wealth tax earns the government about $2.6 billion a year but has cost the country more than $125 billion in capital flight since 1998.

The implication in that quote is "$2.6 gained but $125 lost, wow what a bad tax scheme", which is horribly irresponsible presentation. That's $2.6B/year in increased yearly tax revenues, but a loss of $125B/8 years (1998-2006) in capital, e.g. assets of some kind in the country. In most real-world cases where most of that flight happened early in those 8 years and the year-over-year capital flight goes down as folks acclimate to a tax regime, that's a totally acceptable trade off! In fact, that trade off might be a HUGE boon to France in the near term, let alone the long term. To actually know though, we need tons more information, information that isn't presented at all.

In short, bad article quotes rich guys who don't want to pay taxes saying "our life is so hard now that we've left a country that we liked but not enough to pay taxes on our insanely valuable assets, and that's actually hurting you more than us, so you should totally lower the tax rates on us."

[flagged]

> other than US defense contractors

Not really. Europe needs to rearm in a hurry, and by a lot. There is not way to do that without help from the US defense contractors.

yep, the comment above mentioned that [0]:

> "They were asking me to pay taxes on money I didn't have," Payre said. "I had no choice but to leave the country."

> 1997, he owned shares that were worth $110 million -- on paper. French tax authorities required Payre to pay a wealth tax of 2.2 percent on the shares, based on what the shares would have been worth had he sold them at the market's highest point.

> But Payre said that he didn't have access to them because of stock market regulations that limited his ability to sell and that, in any case, a market dip had devalued the shares below that peak.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43394015

Seems like it'd have to mean nationalizing some percentage of the corporations owned by the wealthy?

I am sure the governments can work it out the same way billionaires with bankers do.

Take possession of parts of their stock in a blind trust and just get dividends or take out loans against the stock and use that cash.

When you tax wealth, like say land or stocks, if the person is illiquid, they have to sell their assets to pay the tax. I would imagine that markets would crash every tax cycle due to people trying to pay their tax obligation.

This is for self defense. The rich would benefit massively from that.

Rich people can always sell assets and then buy similar ones elsewhere. And them being rich, they don't have to do any of the paperwork themselves.

Only the tiniest sliver of the hyperwealthy's assets are physical. The vast majority is equity, which is relatively easy to move.

Where did they go to?

And did they end up coming back?

So, lots of foreign guys who were not paying taxes in britain while benefitting from a temporary exemption and that would leave as soon as this exemption ended, left early because the exemption period was shortenened.

Good. They were making houses more expensive and not paying taxes anyway.

Should tax land more and income less. Income from work is at least productive, owning land is not. #Georgism

You know what? Let them leave. If they have business here, are they going to close shop and forego this market? No, they aren't. Can we still tax them for what they remmit to whatever the place they are? Yes, we can.

And where they will go? Once a major developed nation starts being serious on taxing the billionaires, the others will follow soon, or more probably, they will even coordinate among themselves to harmonize their rates.

Yeah, they could go to some third world hellhole where they could bribe the authorities and live in a Pablo Escobar's style compound. Will they do it? Will they subject themselves to the judicial insecurity that abunds in those places? To politician that manage the incredible feat of being orders of magnitude even more corrupt than the ones we have in washington?

All western nations used to have far higher top marginal rates for income and inheritance taxes. Far less loopholes, and yet here we are.

The super-rich leaving really breaks my heart.

The title of that link seem to imply it was a net loss, but the numbers in the body seem to imply that while ~10k millionaires left, the tax revenue loss from millionaires leaving was $5b in (theoretical) yearly lost tax revenue (it's not clear from the article if all those millionaires leaving were even paying taxes as it notes many of them were in a grace period after entering before taxes kicked in, and it doesn't link to the downstream report from ASI).

Given that there's a lot more than 10 thousand millionaires in Britain and they are sticking around to pay taxes (more than enough to cover the $5b from those who left), I don't see how that's actually a bad thing?

This opponents of this kind of discussion always argue assuming a binary. Either we keep the status-quo, or we will enter a socialist chaos.

We are discussing making a fairer tax system were billionaires pay more of a fair share, we are not proposing full communism where we confiscate all their money.

Is any marginal increase on taxes fatally destined to lead to capital flight? It looks like a lot of people are arguing exactly that. Well, in that case lets stop completely taxing the oligarchs! Trickle down stravaganza now!

Meaning it'll fail like all previous attempts and this will be yet another tax raise on people having a decent job, but nowhere near rich.

What people imagine this means is a tax on rich people. An appartment in the center of paris costs about 10.000 per month. If you calculate how much you need to own to afford that on interest income alone, it's 120000/4% = 3,000,000. Make it 4 million to cover eating out every day as well. That would be the lowest level I would see as super-rich.

But wealth tax, where it exists (e.g. Switzerland) starts at 111.059. This is in a country where a downpayment for a basic apartment would be at least 160000 (but more likely 200.000). So even in famously not-super-low-but-still-pretty-low-tax-Switzerland it's mostly taxing what you would call "professionals". People with a decent, but not spectacular, job (accountant, programmer, ... not FANG wages or doctors). Oh, and looking at the country's finances it becomes immediately clear: Switzerland is low tax because it also has very low unemployment/social support and very low pensions.

The solution to this USED to be inflation, government deficits of 10% even 20% in Southern Europe (before the euro was introduced, which transferred control of inflation to the independent ECB, preventing government deficits financed by inflation, as was the norm in the 1980s and 1990s for example)