alt Hacker NewsRemember when Piketty advised the government of François Hollande? They enacted the wealth tax and there was simply a ton of capital flight and nothing was fixed? Leading to Macron winning the elections and enacting a ton of conservative policies and leading to pretty decent economic growth...
Replies
That's not quite what happened, was it?
First off, capital flight is not a good argument against high wealth taxes, it's an argument for more controls to prevent people from doing this, so they are forced to reinvest in business.
The wealth tax was in for a meager 2 years, and the richest in the country started calling it "anti-business" even though they were transparently refusing to reinvest that money in their company. Anti-business is shorthand for "We can't hire the 1 high-earner executive we want to play golf with instead of the 100 lower level employees that would actually help the economy."
Instead, they kept THEIR salaries and ate that tax cost, and told their employees they would suffer during these times. It was a coordinated effort to discredit something that was meant to create more jobs. Much like when Saudi Arabia artificially restricted oil until after the 2020 election. And the administration had no controls on this.
So yes, high taxes on the rich by themselves are worthless, but that doesn't mean those policies coupled with tighter controls aren't essential for wealth inequality.
Of course, conservative news is going to talk about this in the context of debt, and claim because the amount raised did not match the debt (moronic) that it was clearly a bad idea to tax the rich, when the real takeaway is there needs to be more controls and a bigger spotlight on how these scumbags jerk the system around. At the end of the day, they are trying to keep their yachts and their massive, unnecessary mortgages, and will fight tooth and nail to do so, and anyone falling for news stories about "oh it didn't work in 2 years, my boss said I was going to take a salary cut" is helping that agenda and nothing else.
As I recall, Hollande decided to ignore all the advice around him[0]
>Mr Piketty’s second criticism touches on Mr Hollande’s tax policy. For years the French economist has argued for a more progressive tax system, which would merge both income tax, currently paid by only half of French households, and the “contribution sociale généralisée”, a non-progressive social charge paid by all. This too was one of Mr Hollande’s campaign promises. Yet the president has shelved any plans to overhaul the tax structure, preferring instead simply to increase taxes on the middle-classes and the rich.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2015/01/02/pikettys-snub