> Not in France, where retirement fund is a nation-wide socialized entity, which was the core of this debate. Private pension funds are close to non-existent he

> Not in France, where retirement fund is a nation-wide socialized entity, which was the core of this debate. Private pension funds are close to non-existent here ; i personally cannot name a single person doing that because the public model worked so well for decades. It's not that extreme. There are a lot of "assurances-vie" which are quite literally meant to be private pension funds (with lots of tax incentives...). That being said no-one actually relies on it, and the core of pensions are definitely the nation-wide entities. (Yes plural, we wouldn't be french if there weren't dozens of competing institutions doing the same thing, with of course people getting sucked dry but that administrative complexity) > The first is the landlord mafia keeping apartments empty on purpose for speculation. Because if the entire supply was put on market, the prices would collapse, and people could actually afford housing. We could design a law to tax empty housing proportionally to the owner's wealth, and see how fast we get housing for everyone. I don't agree on the "proportionally to the owner's wealth", simply on the empty apartments' value. But yes, we need to tax empty housing. And we're getting there. There has been a lot of changes with regards to housing taxes that are largely going towards taxing (relatively) more empty housing, with this year being the first year you need to properly declare for every housing you own what its use. And I feel like it's just the start, and we're going to keep those taxes evolving towards taxing empty apartments while taxing less family housing.