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To be fair, France implemented a wealth tax in 1989 and it ended up costing them more in lost tax revenue than they raised. This is the story of most countries
by guywithahat 1y ago
To be fair, France implemented a wealth tax in 1989 and it ended up costing them more in lost tax revenue than they raised. This is the story of most countries that implement a wealth tax (such as Netherlands, Sweden, etc), and is why they end up removing them. Not only do many consider them immoral, they tend to cost the government tax revenue and simply don't work.
- surgical_fire 1y agoThe Netherlands still has a wealth tax.
- riffraff 1y agoItaly implemented a wealth tax on investments (savings account, stocks, bonds) more than years ago, and it doesn't seem to have caused any loss in revenue. They tend to be removed because the richer people convince the poor they need to be removed.
- richwater 1y agoYea Italy's economy is doing great. /s
- hermitcrab 1y ago>they tend to cost the government tax revenue Is that actually true though? Or just something a mouthpiece of the wealthy has put out in some shonky report?
- guywithahat 1y agoYes, as far as I'm aware that was the primary motivation Macron had to remove the wealth tax in France, as with most other countries. The argument is even a small wealth tax is actually an astronomically high tax (a 2% wealth tax is approximately equal to an additional 50% capital gains tax), and so rich people are highly motivated to move their money out of the country or to a form of investment which isn't taxed. Wealth taxes tend to raise basically no money compared to what they wanted, and in return there is less investment in the country hurting the economy. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-03/wealth-tax-in-france-uk-or-new-york-city-it-s-a-bad-idea https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-03/wealth... -> https://archive.ph/jhxzr https://archive.ph/jhxzr