The left-wing French coalition hoping to introduce 90% tax on rich

a new 90% tax on any annual income above €400,000

Lmao. Probably not gonna happen but based af

Honestly, they should probably leave income alone and just double down on the wealth tax.

Wage-based taxation has always been an awkward way to target the rich.

I have very different feelings about someone from a poor background who went into massive debt to develop their skills and become a top earner vs. someone who inherited a fortune and doesn’t put any effort beyond checking their bank balance periodically.

Plus, there is the “won’t they just leave?” argument. Which is mostly FUD, but in the case where someone’s wealth is based on their skilled labor they do have a much easier time just leaving. If your wealth is from owning a portfolio of apartment buildings, good luck taking those with you.

I will enjoy hearing about how the rich will just move away from their fancy mansions on the Riviera and their suites in Paris to avoid paying this tax and then seeing it not happen.

"Radical set of ideas"

Rational set of ideas.

a new 90% tax on any annual income above €400,000 (£337,954)

Sexy, but as other commenters mentioned before, taxing existing wealth is more sexy

Sounds great, now how are they proposing to tax the wealthy. You know, those people who have a jet set lifestyle but no income to tax?

This is a bit of a misleading summary.

Melenchon speaks for his own party, France Unbowed (LFI), not the entire NFP alliance.

The NFP as a whole has not declared support for Melenchon's position, although his party controls 71 (~41%) of NFP's 180 seats in the National Assembly.

Macron has already indicated that he will not allow Melenchon to become Prime Minister, and the entire NFP will be aware that they must select a more moderate leader to represent them if they expect to gain enough support from the centre to operate as a minority government.

To be clear the 90% tax is an income tax, which is actually not unprecedented as other commenters note. Melenchon has talked about 100% but I guess the other parties negotiated him down.

The real problem isn't the income the rich receive, it's their tax avoidance methods that never show up as any income. This effectively puts a barrier on anyone who isn't being a scummy shithead from ever reaching their level, it creates a safe harbor for billionaires to laugh from at anyone who ever reaches their level of influence, power, and wealth and might become their competitor if they do not do so in the manner of their oligarchic decades of experience within their inner circle.

This only convinces idiots, and is about as cluelessly meaningless populist legislation as anything fooling far right fascists. Literally ask yourself, who is the rich, because I can guarantee you it will only affect anyone from low to middle income classes who manage to find any wealth without seeking the horde of tax lobbyists true billionaires have.

Case in point, want to know what "rich" is for this piece of legislation? 90% tax on anyone who happens to earn above €400,000 (£337,954) for that year. I doubt this will even affect people earning above €400,000 every year because they have enough wealth and experience with paying the sort of tax advisors that will help orient them into tax avoidance. Billionaires are laughing at this measure.

I would not be surprised if this suggesting could be traced back to "think tanks" coming with this sort of bullshit that only caters and convinces the ignorant while shielding the actually rich. I realize most people will see this as a good thing because they see this as affecting "the rich", but it really and truly does nothing against the real problem, and I would not even mind it if it wasn't a sign that nothing will be done about billionaire and corporate tax avoidance schemes and that they are only trying to cater to a sentiment.

Hell yes. Finally policy suggestions which make sense. Autocratphiles masquerading as communists are mad at this turn of events??

Back in the 50s and 60s after WW2 the UK had a 95% tax band for the highest earners. This was due to the country struggling to pay off its debts to the USA after WW2. The Beatles even wrote their song Taxman about it in 1966.

Ultimately there is a problem with these super high taxbands whereby countries that try them will often encounter something called the Laffer Curve whereby overall tax take decreases as the tax rate increases. This isn't even necessarily tax evasion, all it takes is for wealthy people to be suitably motivated to avoid taxes.

In the UK now if your income breaches £100k then you are paying a higher rate of tax on everything earned over that amount but also you lose the £12.5k tax free allowance that all citizens are entitled to. Overall breaching £100k leads to you paying a marginal rate of tax of 60% even if you don't earn much over it. Because of this high earning jobs often let you put money into salary sacrifice pension schemes to avoid breaching the £100k mark. It only becomes worthwhile earning over £100k when you reach the region of ~£130k, which is substantially more. Essentially the system encourages tax avoidance by having this cliff which people who are behaving like rational agents will do anything to avoid. If it were less punative then some economists argue that the government would raise more money.

Macron would probably sooner dissolve the republic and declare the third empire than allow this to happen, but I wish the NPF good luck.

As Macron likes to say: “Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet”

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Petrol price controls is a terrible idea.

Why not subsidised (free) public transport, more cycle lanes more cycle parking, subsidised electric bikes, mandated EV charging.

Based

lol it's like France loves to choose violence every time.

The problem with high wealth taxes is the same as the problem with nationalizing privately-owned businesses. Even if you're not worried about the people you tax fleeing the country (maybe they can't because their investments aren't mobile) you still have to worry about the fact that no one would build anything in France (even things not currently taxed) if there was good reason to think that France might suddenly decide to seize a large fraction of its value.

(High income taxes aren't as big a deal because wealthy people can restructure their investments in order to avoid most of them, but I wonder whether the lost economic activity is actually worth more to the country than the money raised by the tax.)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

France's left wing New Popular Front (NPF) - now the largest group in parliament - has called for a prime minister who will implement its ideas including a new wealth tax and petrol price controls.

The leftist alliance secured the most seats in the recent French elections but fell short of the 289 needed for a majority in the National Assembly, France's lower house of parliament.

President Emmanuel Macron's Together bloc came in second and Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) party finished third.

France's parties are now jockeying for position and it's unclear exactly how things will shake out, but the NPF has insisted it will implement its radical set of ideas.

It is possible that President Macron - who called the snap election in a bid to counter the rise of the far-right - could seek a deal with more moderate elements of the NFP.

His government last week suspended a decree that would have diminished workers' rights to unemployment benefits, which has been interpreted as a gesture toward the left.

The original article contains 388 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

Tax them. Tax the fuck out of their income and wealth.

The really wealthy don't take income. Instead they park their wealth in stocks and trust funds and leverage those as collateral for cheap loans from their buddies at the bank.

I thought communists were intelligent but this thread is devoid of any intelligence. quite cheery about something that won't even impact any capitalist.

Don't you all know what "Capital"ist means?

An income tax is a tax on the working class.

You morons should stop salivating and start eating more dried fruits.

Edit: I realize calling people morons is a bit too much. Sorry about that. I was just miffed by a few who were cheering on punishing their own class. It's so hard to find class solidarity in this day and age.

Can we get a non Murdoch source on this?

This is not a tax on the rich, it's a tax on the upper middle class.

hell yea

The sad thing about high taxes like that is that it can penalize normal people with a normal, high income job. 400k won't probably matter but in my experience, I have a high salary and I don't have the time or even the money to hire a bunch of people to optimize my taxes in a tax free-heaven paradise.

Normal working people shouldn't be taxed like crazy. Corporation is the thing we want to target. Large corporations. They have the mean to evade the laws.

The common man and women does not. Even if you have a small company, you do not have the time or the money to ignore the laws or taxes.

Capitalism isn't made for big corporations. It is made for small company competing with each other. How the fuck the common Man is supposed to compete with Walmart? Like, what??