Taxes on some wealthy French
top 100 percent of income
 |
| Socialist Francois Hollande |
PARIS | Sat May 18, 2013
[Reuters] The newspaper said that the exceptionally high level of taxation was due to a one-off levy last year on 2011 incomes for households with assets of more than 1.3 million euros ($1.67 million).
President Francois Hollande's Socialist government imposed the tax surcharge last year, shortly after taking office, to offset the impact of a rebate scheme created by its conservative predecessor to cap an individual's overall taxation at 50 percent of income.
The government has been forced to redraft a proposed bill to levy a temporary 75 percent tax on earnings over 1 million euros, which had been one of Hollande's campaign pledges.
The Constitutional Council has judged such a high rate of taxation to be unfair, leaving the government to rehash it to hit companies rather than individuals.
Since then, a top administrative court has determined that a marginal tax rate higher than 66.66 percent on a single household risked being considered as confiscatory by the council.
Les Echos reported that nearly 12,000 households paid taxes last year worth more than 75 percent of their 2011 revenues due to the exceptional levy. ($1 = 0.7798 euros)
[Reporting by Leigh Thomas, Editing by Mark Trevelyan]
That'll teach 'em to be French!
ReplyDeleteI assume this affects Jaques Kerrey as well?
And this guy, too!
ReplyDeleteReparations.
ReplyDeleteCould there be anything wrong with knowing how to speak ANY foreign language?
ReplyDeleteI DON'T THINK SO, ergo whatever "arguments" might be raised on this point would be specious and ill founded.
The ARTICLE was about taxing away 100% of a person's income just because that person has been extremely capable in business or been singularly blest by the gods.
Why respondents invariably delight in dealing with IRRELEVANCIES I honesty don't know.
I find it SILLY rather than IRKSOME frankly.
Shaw: It must be a massachussetts thing.
ReplyDeleteIf you study the French government, this is rational.
ReplyDeleteThe French government is responsible for something like over 60% of the nation's GDP. This is where progressives want to take the US.
If government is going to do more for everyone, it must take more from everyone.
Governments do not make money on their own because they produce no goods or services they can sell to others. So they must take it from others.
So, in summary, government takes from you so it can give to you.
Any questions?
I await the inevitable childish strawmen comments about how I hate roads, bridges, and utilities infrastructure.
"Reparations," my GLUTEUS MAXIMUS!
ReplyDeleteIf we get into that stupid game, we'll have to go all the way back to Eden, and force EVE to accept and suffer responsibility for all the evils she loosed upon the world.
Someday the world will have to learn once and for all that NO ONE will ever be able to get a TIT for giving a TAT.
It's like the concept of "Joint and Several Liabilities" with which the EPA tortures and impoverishes landowners. I know, personally, someone who is "land poor" and who has been blocked and balked by the EPA for the past TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, because some previous owner -- OVER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO -- produced "something" the EPA has deemed "threatening to the environment."
SO, the poor man is not PERMITTED by LAW to SELL or even GIVE AWAY this acreage nor USE it for ANY purpose whatsoever, UNLESS and UNTIL he (the current landowner) spends HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of DOLLARS, which he does not have and cannot get, cleaning up the land to the EPA'S Satisfaction.
NO entity should have THAT much power to ruin the fortune's of ANY individual on the pretext of serving "The Greater Good."
Meanwhile the land lays fallow, the man either pays TAXES on it, or it gets gobbled up by GUESS WHOM?
The STATE, of course!
Sweet little world we've built for ourselves, eh?
Reparations?
ReplyDeleteSure, if Sour latte liberal 1%'ers with their guns lockered in Maine get taken first...
No where IN the article does it talk about taking away 100% of someone's income.
ReplyDeleteFirst, they came for "the rich"...
ReplyDeleteFT mentioned:
someone who is "land poor" and who has been blocked and balked by the EPA for the past TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, because some previous owner -- OVER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO -- produced "something" the EPA has deemed "threatening to the environment."
SO, the poor man is not PERMITTED by LAW to SELL or even GIVE AWAY this acreage nor USE it for ANY purpose whatsoever, UNLESS and UNTIL he (the current landowner) spends HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of DOLLARS, which he does not have and cannot get, cleaning up the land to the EPA'S Satisfaction.
What madness!
---------------
About reparations, give the entire state of Massachusetts back to the Native Americans, and confiscate ALL THE PROPTERTY AND ASSETS of those living in Massachusetts right now -- as reparations, of course.
The same people who decry a teacher's punishing an entire classroom for the misdeeds of a few promote the collective idea of reparations. Go figure.
Technically, you're right, Jerry. The headline does tend to be misleading, however, the TREND -- even the THOUGHT of confiscating ANY portion of ANYONE's private store of wealth -- is abhorrent to us Conservative-Libertarians. And I don't believe anyone could deny that the TREND in Socialist countries is to take ever-increasing portions of wealth away from "The Rich" and give it to "The Poor" -- at least in theory. In practice most of the confiscated wealth goes to fund the ever growing machinery of Big Government acting in loco parentis, as Santa Claus, or as Fairy Godmother -- take your choice.
ReplyDeleteUnder Socialism "Santa" keeps getting fatter, the poor get poorer and the wealth of the formerly-rich gets whittled away by increasingly stringent demands.
The cliché runs true.
The only thing wrong with Socialism is that, eventually, you run out of OTHER PEOPLES' MONEY."
Hold.
ReplyDeleteThe.
Phone.
Didn't some households in France get taxed at or over 100% of those households' incomes? See this: More than 8,000 French households' tax bills topped 100 percent of their income in 2012, according to a French newspaper report.
Apparently, there was some kind of carry-over fee from 2011, a fee to be paid as part of 2012 taxes. Retroactive tax bills? Or something else?
The CNBC article also states the following:
"In 2011, 5,221 households had a tax rate of more than 100 percent on their revenues, Some 6,203 households had a rate of more than 85 percent and 6,343 house holds a rate of more than 75 percent," the newspaper said but households could take advantage of a "tax shield" introduced by Sarkozy to cap an individual's overall taxation at 50 percent of their income.
I can barely understand the U.S. Tax Code. I guess that I can't be expected to understand the tax code of France, huh?
I sent this brief article to a longtime friend, who's been living in France since 1967, and has become to all intents and purposes "French."
ReplyDeleteI asked:
"What in GOD'S name is going on in your adopted country?"
He blithely replied within moments:
"It's to pay for all the 'freebies,' free health care, free schools, free universities, vacations, retirement plans, etc., etc., etc., not to mention defense (the wars in Mali and elsewhere in Africa)."
Having been engulfed and devoured ages ago by the prevailing ethos in Europe, he sees nothing WRONG in this, and no irony whatsoever, though he came from a modestly rich, Middle-Class American family who had a beautiful home in Oyster Bay, Long Island.
He has grown to despise the land of his birth, and has accepted The European View that we are a bunch of tasteless barbarians, unschooled, unsophisticated, barely literate with a revoltingly wasteful lifestyle, and that it's long past time we got our comeuppance for all the dreadful things we've perpetrated in our shameful past.
Needless to say, our "friendship" has not grown. We've drifted farther and farther apart over the years. I'm sure you can see why, right?
He's a victim of GroupThink, of course. Has completely lost touch with Reality.
I wouldn't dare say this, if I didn't know he lives primarily on inherited wealth from his family kept safely in trust for him in the country he professes to hate.
If his parents had permitted him to have control over the resources they wisely left in trust for him, the funds would have been gobbled up by the French government before you could say "Bastille Day."
In my view, the very words exceptional levy should give one serious pause.
ReplyDeleteDoes government ever find a tax that the government doesn't like?
How many "temporary taxes" become permanent or nearly permanent?
FT,
ReplyDeleteYou know what? I know quite a few Americans who think the same way that your friend in France does.
One such individual whom I know is my neighbors' son (b. 1970). He despises capitalism and is very vocal in expressing his views. YET he lives off capitalists -- his parents and his rich girlfriends (mostly CEO's!). He never pays a dime in taxes, either! "Won't support this corrupt system!" he declares
He drives this parents' castoff cars (at least 15 years old). He bums off anybody he can find. The fellow has such charisma -- and a degree in communications, the kind of degree that should have led him into a career in public relations. He has refused every job offer, of course, and declares, "I'm living by my principles!"
This fellow has quite a few friends of the same ilk, and many of them found each other at a small college in the Shenandoah Valley.
You "friend," AOW, is yet-another spine-tingling answer to Noel Coward's question first posed in 1927:
ReplyDeleteWhat's going to happen to the children when there aren't any more grown-ups?
As you know, FrogBurger, my friend and frequent commenter, is French, too. He wouldn't live there again to save his life and his family's very sour about their life now, too. It's NUTS.
ReplyDeleteBut, the best lifestyle I ever lived, those 4 years in Paris :) I have to admit that. Of course, we paid every cent of our way...we and the company$$$ mr Z worked for.
AOW's line "They came for the rich...." stunned me. Is that yours, AOW? It's so right.
The left just doesn't see it. I have to giggle when the lefties come to my site and tell me I'm against the middle class as if I'm living in a Beverly Hills mansion..?? I AM middle class, but I hate..me? I AM a woman but I hate ME because I hate seeing babies killed and businesses lying about it and my having to pay for them?..I AM a person of immigrant parents and I'm against immigration?
The fun never stops.
This 100% thing is CRAZY....soon, nobody in France will have any savings, either; then they'll get EVERYBODY on the government dole. And we're following in socialist lockstep. Well, except for those of us who are smart enough to see what's happening.
But then, we hate women and we hate the sick and we ........you get the idea, FT :-)
All I can say to you, dear Z, and others who may feel the same way is, "Don't believe any of the nonsense 'they' would attribute to you either out of ignorance or malice."
ReplyDeleteI still believe that most people mean well, and most people want the best for others as well as themselves, BUT too an f us have been persuaded to see others as "hateful enemies," wen in fact all we get in the way of information about those we don't know personally is Agenda-Driven Propaganda of one kind or another from ALL sides.
I've never lived in Paris (Lucky You!), but I think this notion taken on by too many on the American Right that the French are somehow contemptible, spineless wimps is ridiculous.
Yet, I know that the USA gets a very "bad press" in Europe and Britain as well.
I used to blame the enemedia, itself, for spreading all the misunderstanding, but more lately I think we should hold those who OWN the enemedia responsible. They FINANCE this stuff, therefore it stands to reason they get to dictate terms.
I've always liked your friend Froggie, as I call him. I'm sorry his family is unhappy over there.
I remember reading Peter Mayles' A Year in Provence -- oh it must be twenty years ago at least -- and it made that part of France sound heavenly to me. Mayles is or was a British journalist and a wonderful writer who seemed very high on life -- but nobody's fool.
Culture Vulture and inveterate gourmet that I am, I'm sure I'd enjoy being in France today, even if the French did look at me a weather eye. ;-)
After all, there ARE many important things to consider outside of politics.
This is what happens when people allow their government to run amok.
ReplyDeleteFrance used to be such a strong and capable nation, independent and proud.
It's sad how the mighty have fallen, as well as the Brits and Italians.
We are already on the same path here in the states.
God help our precious children.
@z --- AOW's line "They came for the rich...." stunned me.
ReplyDelete----
Me too. I'm stunned and concerned that she doesn't realize Kapital has already come for her.
Duck,
ReplyDeleteYou know that you're not stunned by my views. You and I have a history of some 8 years. Both you and I are quite consistent with regard to our worldviews.
As for what I realize, I'll stun you some more: I realize a lot more than I say publicly. In other words, I'm more of a realist than you might believe. After all, I'm 61 years old.
Leticia, have I told you yet, that I really like your new avatar? It's really cool. ;-)
ReplyDelete