France is giving us a lesson on why wealth taxes always fail - "If wealth taxes were the easy solution that the online activists and Left-wing populists claim they are, then France would surely be doing brilliantly right now. Amid a budget crisis last year, the country imposed a special surcharge on anyone earning more than €250,000 (£216,000) a year. So the deficit is fixed, right?... According to figures from the finance ministry this week, the so-called differential contribution, a special rate of income tax for the highest earners, generated an additional €400m last year. That compares to a forecast of €1.9bn... Of course, it is not hard to work out what went wrong. The better-off simply adjusted their income to bring themselves under the threshold, or else they moved elsewhere. Paris was emerging as a serious rival to London as a financial centre, with lots of encouragement from Emmanuel Macron, but the financiers and hedge fund managers have all left, We haven’t heard much about bankers crossing the channel recently, while senior executives and successful entrepreneurs are getting out. None of that will deter the high-tax, big state fanatics who now control the French parliament. The Left is already arguing that a clampdown on avoidance is needed, while the 2026 budget extends the temporary corporation tax surcharge that takes the rate up to a punishing 36pc for the country’s 400 largest companies. It surely can’t be long before major French companies such as the infrastructure operator Vinci or the drinks manufacturer Pernod Ricard, and perhaps even LVMH, are forced by their shareholders to move somewhere where they are not made to pay for the country’s lavish pension system. Taxes go up, revenues go down, so the political establishment puts them up again to make up the shortfall. No one in Paris seems able to work out what is going wrong. And yet, the rest of the world should pay attention to what is happening in France. In her last Budget, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, imposed a mansion tax, a wealth tax under a different name, and if she and Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, are ousted this year, it seems certain the party will impose some form of levy on assets. In New York, Mamdani is demanding a 2pc extra surcharge on incomes above $1m (£740,000). California is poised to hold a referendum later this year on a one-off 5pc wealth tax. In 2022, Spain introduced a two-year “solidarity tax” on assets of more than €3m, and surprise, surprise, it has now been rolled over, and looks set to remain in place permanently. With government deficits soaring and budgets under pressure, wealth taxes have never been more politically popular. The trouble is, they never work. We have just seen that in France, and there are early signs of it in the UK as well. Only this week, the latest figures showed the amount collected from capital gains tax fell by 8pc in 2025, or £1.3bn. It wasn’t hard to work out why. The annual exemption was slashed from £12,000 to just £3,000 – shamefully by the last Conservative government – and anyone with a gain simply postponed selling instead of paying more. With the mansion tax, we will suddenly find that most properties are worth less than the £2m threshold. Likewise, wealthy entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel and the Google co-founder Sergey Brin are already leaving California ahead of its vote, while Spain forecast revenues of €1.5bn when it introduced its levy, but the actual amount came in at slightly over €600m. Once again, it was a spectacular flop. A handful of governments have figured out a better strategy. Italy, with its flat tax on non-doms, has turned Milan into a hub for financiers and dealmakers, with property prices in the city rising by 49pc since it was introduced. Dubai keeps booming on the back of its minimal taxes. The lesson from wherever wealth taxes are imposed could hardly be clearer. They drive out entrepreneurs, deter wealth creation, damage savings and investment, and worst of all, they never raise anything more than a fraction of the amount expected. Once the second-round impacts are taken into account, they generally mean lower overall tax revenues."
Meme - Kendric Tonn: "There are several things one could say about this, but the thing that's getting me is the evident belief that $500 is a lot of damage, instead of, like, the absolute lowest number in which fixing problems on a property is denominated"
sarah @thesarahkelly: "I admit it's a low priority but I would support legislation that made "pet rent" illegal. I don't know how we normalized this practice over the last decade or so but it's a scam.
There is simply no way my dog is doing an extra $500 A YEAR in damage or wear and tear. I already put down a deposit! It is already legal to bill/sue me for damages exceeding the deposit! You're just being greedy."
Left wingers think maintaining a property is costless, which is why they seethe at paying rent
Chuck Ross on X - "Nekima Levy Armstrong, who takes $200k salary at her "anti-poverty" charity, sent three of her kids to a "prestigious boarding school on the east coast," her husband wrote a few years ago."
Bonchie on X - "The numbers are worse when you add more context. From 2019-2024, her “charity” raised $5.2 million. She paid *herself* $1.2 million of that while giving out only $700k in grants. The level of abuse of non-profits in this country by activists is insane."
Time to tax churches!
The Fallacy of Redistribution - "The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago... Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended. The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example. In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity. People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country... Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call "human capital." When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind. Fidel Castro's confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital. We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future. If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others. That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them."
Thomas Sowell from 2012
Borrowing to keep up (with the Joneses): Inequality, debt, and conspicuous consumption - "The quest for status is a powerful motivator, but does it affect inequality? This paper presents a novel lab experiment that was designed and conducted to identify the relationship between conspicuous consumption, access to credit, and inequality. We report four main findings: First, consumption increases when it is “conspicuous” (i.e., is both observable and signaling ability). Second, costly borrowing increases when consumption is conspicuous. Third, the increase in costly borrowing is driven by those at lower income levels. Finally, in the presence of conspicuous consumption, access to credit exacerbates inequality."
Clearly, we just need to give poor people money to end poverty
Kiyah Willis on X - "I love capitalism because it has lifted much of the world out of poverty, made lifesaving innovations easily accessible, and allowed millions of people to live happy lives full of passion and love. You hate capitalism becaue someone you've never met owns a yacht and you don't"
Meme - The Other 98%: "If you're a Christian and you're big mad about the possibility of student loan debt being canceled. Let me remind you that the entirety of your faith is built on a debt that you can't pay that someone else stepped in and paid for you"
The Meme Policeman: "This equivocation of the word "debt" is impressive, truly one for the ages."
"The difference is Jesus didn't steal from me to pay the debt. He paid it all himself."
"So in this analogy, that would make Government their god. Makes perfect sense."
"Uh, I'm not really Christian, but I'm like 97% sure that's not what it is."
Calls for wealth tax as Rich List shows £772bn in the hands of just 350 families : r/unitedkingdom - "“You can’t tax wealth” But you can use it as collateral to generate income. Cunts."
"That is the loophole that needs to be closed."
"It's not even a loophole. Reddit has convinced itself that someone can generate endless tax-free income by taking a loan against stocks, seemingly forgetting that loans have to be repaid from income, which is taxed. At best it's a delay in paying that tax, not a reduction in it."
"What makes you think that loans have to be paid from income?"
"Because that's how the monthly payments are paid, from income. Either salary, dividends or capital gains. The main purpose of such collateral loans are to allow quick access to liquidity in a way that avoids onerous taxation (mostly an American thing as short-term capital gains have a higher tax rate), avoid volatility, or to avoid having to sell a controlling share to access that liquidity. I know everyone on this site is convinced you can just take a loan and then somehow not pay it back, or convinced you just take more loans to pay it off, that's not how it works and for most examples, it'll result in the outstanding balance being greater than shareholding, meaning they'll be bankrupted within 10-15 years trying to service the debt by selling everything they have, and they'll still owe those taxes. The only scenario where that could realistically work is either if the borrower dies within a few years of the loan, or if their shareholding is wildly disproportionate to their annual spend (think £1bn shareholding, and an annual spend of £200k). Otherwise, it sits within the Reddit School of Economics lore alongside "supermarkets allow charity donations at the till all for the tax write-off"."
Left wingers are economically illiterate. That's why they're poor
San Diego State Wants Students to “Interrogate Capitalism” - "At San Diego State University (SDSU), ethnic studies students are learning to approach their internships from a “decolonial perspective” and to challenge the “colonizer logic of work.” Thanks to funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the university now offers a course called “Ethnic and Gender Studies in the Workplace,” part of a broader project to apply the principles of ethnic studies beyond the campus. The “Building Decolonized Internship Pipelines” project, which SDSU launched last year, seeks to address a problem endemic to women’s, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies (area studies) departments: their students are routinely underemployed... To address this perception—and presumably, to improve students’ chances at gainful employment—the project proposes an unconventional approach: applying decolonial ideology. “To counter deficit models of [area studies] students,” the project aims to create a navigating-the-workplace course and internship program “from a decolonial perspective,” the grant proposal said. In practice, this means teaching students to be skeptical of the “colonizer logic of work.” That logic, the proposal noted, “seeks to indoctrinate and police students into uncritical, non-self-reflecting citizens who do not interrogate the relationship between capitalism and minoritized cultural practices, values, and traditions.” One of the SDSU initiative’s key activities is developing an “Ethnic and Gender Studies in the Workplace” course. This course teaches students “how to interrogate capitalism and minoritized cultural practices, values, and traditions” while “challenging and resisting white supremacy, racism and hate, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, imperialism, and contemporary colonialism that are deeply entangle [sic] with professional workplaces.” The new course is seemingly designed to make area-studies students even less employable... SDSU’s decolonized internship program is just one in a flurry of new ethnic studies projects in California. In 2024, the Mellon Foundation gave the California State University System $1.5 million to “Expand Ethnic Studies Pathways.” The system used these dollars for nearly a dozen smaller grants to its campuses for projects such as “Advancing Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies” and “Advancing Two Spirit and Indigenous Trans Sovereignty.” In a recent Wall Street Journal article, I describe the Mellon Foundation’s activist turn. The country’s largest funder of the humanities has embraced a political agenda, single-mindedly focused on advancing “social justice.” SDSU’s project offers a small but poignant example of the consequences. The Mellon-funded program sets out to teach students that the workplace is oppressive and to prepare them to challenge it. By making students less prepared for post-college life, the Mellon Foundation continues to undermine the case for the humanities."
ZUBY: on X - "It's funny how it's anti-capitalists who are so much more obsessed with money than capitalists. They're always focusing on how much money other people have and how they should spend it."
The Atlas Society on X - "The builder dreams about creating value. The critic dreams about redistribution."
Argentina's Milei News ๐ฆ๐ท๐ค๐ on X - "BREAKING๐ด ARGENTINA's WHEAT-HARVEST SHATTERS ALL-TIME RECORD HIGH
In a stunning victory for Argentina’s rural sector, farmers have just harvested a jaw-dropping 27.7 million tons of wheat — a massive 20% surge above the previous all-time record. This historic milestone, thanks to President Milei's tax breaks, marks another triumph for the productive countryside, proving that freedom and sound policies deliver results. Contrast this with the Kirchnerist era, when the country was forced to import wheat after production collapsed to an embarrassing low of just 8 million tons. Today, Argentina is once again feeding the world and writing a new chapter of agricultural greatness. Argentina's golden fields are roaring back — and it sure looks like the best is yet to come. @JMilei"
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "As leftist policies fail in increasingly high profile and undeniable fashion, and people and businesses continue to flee en masse, Democrats will now do what socialists have always done in these situations — build a wall to keep people in against their will. Both Mamdani and Bernie Sanders have now seriously proposed an economic Berlin Wall around blue jurisdictions to prevent population and capital loss as a result of people not wanting to live under socialist policies anymore. It’s hard to articulate how un American this really is. But I expect nothing less from these people. We fought a Cold War to prevent this from happening here. And we might have to take even more drastic action against our own Soviet uprising."
Stefan Schubert on X - "The US tax system has become much more progressive (notice the X-axis). The richest pay half their income in tax, the poorest nothing."
Christian Heiens ๐ on X - "The idea that we can balance the budget or even just avoid financial Gotterdammerung at this point if we simply raise taxes across the board is just wrong. Just look at how consistent Federal revenues as a percent of GDP has been since WWII. The tax code has certainly not been consistent during the last 80 years. We had an extremely progressive tax code in the 1950s and a much flatter one today, and yet the amount of money the Feds can extract as a percentage of GDP has remained relatively stable during this time. This suggests that we already know more or less where the Laffer Curve is, and raising taxes wouldn’t do much of anything to raise revenues more than a few points as a percent of GDP. The problem is the Federal government’s spending trajectory is utterly unsustainable, not that we aren’t collecting enough in taxes. But nothing can be done to rein spending in because it’s political suicide to do so. “Nothing stops this train” as Lyn Alden likes to say. Financial repression is inevitable."
Thread by @simonsarris on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I used to believe this but then you run the numbers and you find out that in practice its not true at all. The most dense cities in the US have *higher*, not lower, municipal spend per person. There's basically an inverse to cost savings in practice. Partly this is because as you increase density you increase municipal demands. You're doing more with more. But part of it is that as you make a more dense city you bring brand new problems and costs that couldn't exist before that you now have to spend on. Looking at the extreme example, NYC's municipal social spending alone is the same as San Antonio's entire spend. That's fine, its a choice a city can make. But if a city decides to expand scope then that ruins any tax efficiency argument, and it seems regularly true.
"Look how much money we could save if we were a city"
"Does the city spend less per person?"
"Well, no, they spend more"
Struck me as odd when I first found it. It seems pertinent to infrastructure discussions. Infrastructure is not built in a vacuum. These are total spend which has some data problems (NYC's includes schools, many others do not, etc) I asked Gemini to include a few more including SF, some data may be suspect but it mostly looks good, here:"
Arpit Gupta on X - "Also remarkable that NYC’s budget per capita is comparable to Spain, Singapore, or Japan *on top of* everything the federal government handles"
Kevin A. Bryan on X - "On fiscal position of US relative to social welfare states: in US places with very high public spending, what do you get? NY State spends 3x/student what Ontario or Utah spends! If they spent US avg = 240k/student saved = free 4 yr daycare + parent leave + free public univ.
It is a mystery where the money goes. It isn't just salaries: NY State 33% higher average teacher salary vs US overall, ~40% higher vs Utah or Ontario. Total school spending 3x. Outcomes worse despite this - < US avg even adjusting for SES. Would love an accounting deep dive."
Total NIMBY Death on X - "its funny how people start discussing politics like its an abstract battle of ideas between "low taxes, poor services" vs "high taxes, good services" but then they discover that high spending in blue states is just a scam, it goes into a money pit."
Weird. Left wingers keep insisting that cities are efficient and the suburbs are inefficient and want to force everyone to live in a city. In reality it's easier to push the left wing agenda that way
Dominic Pino on X - "France doesn't only tax the rich at much higher rates than the US. It also taxes the middle class more. A LOT more. And the government still can't pay its bills."
Philippe Lemoine on X - "I think people, including and perhaps especially in France, don't realize how expensive a welfare state as large as we have in France is. You need to raise ridiculous amounts of money and, in practice, the only way to do that is through broad-based taxation. But politicians don't want to admit that, often I think they don't really understand it themselves, so instead of telling people the truth about the trade-offs involved, those on the left pretend we could pay for it just by taxing the rich while those on the right pretend we could pay for it by eliminating waste ๐คท♂️"
Clearly, France needs to make the rich pay their "fair share" and to "tax the 'rich'"
Opinion | France learns it cannot sustain its welfare state by taxing the rich - The Washington Post - "France has budget problems, so politicians reached for a politically popular solution: Tax the rich. Never mind that France already had the second highest tax rate in Europe for its top bracket at 55.4 percent. Or that it already had surtaxes on income over 250,000 euros and income over 500,000 euros. Politicians hashed out a compromise in 2025 to add a “differential contribution” for individuals with taxable income over 250,000 euros. If, after calculating tax liability, someone’s average tax rate was below 20 percent, they’d need to pay extra to reach that proportion. The government forecast that this would raise 1.9 billion euros in revenue during 2025. Turns out, it actually raised — sacre bleu! — 400 million euros, a 79 percent miss. The tax’s projected revenue for 2026 is now a billion euros less than previously estimated. The government blames the shortfall on a change in the tax’s design. It was supposed to be retroactive to 2024, but in practice it applied only to 2025. Saying that a tax works if it re-taxes people who already paid is not the strongest argument for its soundness. The French far-left say the problem is the tax didn’t go far enough. (They always say that.) But government already took in over half of France’s GDP in revenue in 2024, before the new tax was added. How much is enough?... The average single French worker gets to keep only 53 percent of his or her pay after taxes, compared with 70 percent for the average single American worker. For average one-earner families with two children, the tax burden is almost twice as high in France as in America. And those figures are only for taxes on labor. They don’t include the burden of France’s national value-added tax, with a standard rate of 20 percent on consumer purchases of goods and services. (Compare that with the average U.S. sales tax rate of 7.53 percent.) France’s massive welfare state was not built by taxing the rich. It was built by taxing the rich and everyone else at far higher rates than Americans would ever tolerate. Yes, France has universal government health coverage, but nearly all French people have private insurance on top of that. France also has lower average gross wages (adjusted for purchasing power), a much higher unemployment rate and much slower economic growth than the U.S. These stats of shame are all related. Even then, all those taxes still aren’t enough to avoid an enormous budget deficit. Efforts at reform have torn apart French politics, and bond markets are now making clear that past changes weren’t anywhere near enough to solve the problem. The unsustainable welfare state also means France cannot afford its ambitions to build a self-sufficient military or fully support Ukraine as it fends off Russia. The bleak conclusion: Politicians in Paris have made promises they can’t keep to a people who are now dependent on government for their livelihoods. Charismatic socialists keep trying to sell Americans on the European model. Look under the hood, and it’s clearly a lemon."
Rutger Bregman on X - "Whenever European billionaires threaten to leave Europe for the US, feel free to remind them that they'll actually pay more income tax over there ๐"
Christopher M. Meissner on X - "European welfare states have much more regressive tax systems than the USA in order to support their welfare systems. Counterintuitive as though it may be. Peter Lindert, author of “Growing Public”, amongst others, has been saying this for decades."
Aakash Gupta on X - "Everyone is missing the second chart. The left chart shows effective income tax rates. The U.S. taxes its poor less and its rich more than France and the Netherlands. That’s the number Thompson is leading with, and it’s real. But the right chart is where the actual story lives. That’s total average tax rates, which includes consumption taxes like VAT. And look what happens: the Netherlands jumps to ~45% for middle-income earners. France stays elevated across the board. The U.S. stays the lowest for the bottom 60% of earners. Why? Because European welfare states are funded by 20-25% VAT rates that hit every purchase a lower-income household makes. Denmark charges 25% VAT. Hungary charges 27%. The EU average is 21.6%. The U.S. has no federal consumption tax and state sales taxes average around 5-6%. When you spend 80-90% of your income on consumption (as most lower-income households do), a 20% VAT is functionally a 16-18% income tax that never shows up on your pay stub. And here’s what both charts agree on: billionaires in every country converge toward the same effective rate. The U.S. top 400 pay about 24% of economic income. French and Dutch billionaires land in a similar range once you account for all taxes. Zucman’s own G20 report estimates global billionaires pay roughly 0.3% of their wealth annually, regardless of jurisdiction. The “be more like Europe” framing assumes Europe taxes the rich and spares the poor. The data shows Europe taxes everyone, especially through consumption, and the rich find the same exits everywhere. The real policy question this surfaces: European countries collect 34% of GDP in taxes vs. 27% for the U.S., and that 7-point gap comes almost entirely from taxing the bottom 60% harder through VAT. The trade is higher taxes on the poor in exchange for universal healthcare, childcare, and public transit. You can argue that’s a good trade. But you can’t argue the poor aren’t paying for it."
Drew Pavlou ๐ฆ๐บ๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ฆ๐น๐ผ on X - "If Elon Musk liquidated his entire wealth tomorrow and gave all his money to the poor it would legitimately be a disaster for humanity. Trillions of dollars in wealth would be incinerated, multiple companies at the frontier of human technological advancement would be destroyed, human space exploration would be set back decades. And for what? Most people would just use the money on drugs, porn, crypto and online sports gambling. Destroy SpaceX, Tesla, xAI so that idiots can spend a $200 Elon stimmy cheque on OnlyFans and online sports gambling. The worst trade off in history. Consider actual reality here. Elon’s wealth is tied up in shares so if he tried to liquidate all his positions at once, the stock price would immediately crash, destroying trillions in value for normal middle class people whose pensions rely on stock market growth. Ultimately Elon could probably only recover 10-15% of the headline $850 billion figure if he tried to immediately go liquid. Then you would have to divide that up across hundreds of million of people. If you tried to target the poorest people on Earth - those earning less than $3 a day - you would have to try distribute about $100 billion to 800 million people. About $120 each. Logistically you would lose at least 20-30% of that on last mile delivery: banking fees, security, fraud, identifying the poor, preventing corruption. So you end up getting $90 to 800 million seperate people. That is one month of income. The equivalent of a COVID stimmy cheque in a rich world country. Did COVID stimmy cheques solve the problem of poverty in the US? No, of course not, because one time infusions of cash are not enough to end poverty. Even if you kept the program just within the United States it would largely be pointless. Divide 100 billion across the 40 million Americans below the federal poverty line - you get a $2500 payment per person. Roughly the equivalent of two COVID stimmy cheques. Not exactly world changing stuff. Studies show that significant amounts of money from COVID stimmy cheques in America and Australia went directly to non-essential spending - gambling, day trading, crypto, online porn. Studies from Australia show that when people were allowed to liquidate their superannuation (retirement fund savings) during COVID, they spent massive amounts on gambling. Up to 11% of all funds withdrawn from superannuation went towards online gambling. Sadly the reality is that many poor people do not know how to manage money. If you think the poor are only poor due to lack of money, you’re an idiot. Poverty is unfortunately far more complex than that, which is why so many poor people who win the lottery wind up going broke. Elon could liquidate everything tomorrow, destroy all his companies. The end result would be a redistribution of wealth away from productive enterprises (companies pushing the frontier of human knowledge and civilizational advancement) towards some of the most non-productive ends imaginable: organised crime, drugs, prostitution, porn, online gambling. Legitimate world historic disaster. I would rather Elon keep the money."
Hunter Ash on X - "“Tax the rich” means converting SpaceX and Neuralink into hot cheetos for obese people."
