French President François Hollande speaks
during a joint news conference with President Obama, as...
I was living in Brussels when François
Hollande, the President of France, introduced his 75 percent top rate tax in
2012. Immediately, my quarter began to fill with French exiles, who could
commute to Paris in just over an hour. One of the few Belgians left in my
street, a stern local matriarch, stopped me as I left the house one morning.
“You’re in politics, Monsieur le Député, maybe you can tell me
something. What kind of hell must these poor souls be fleeing if they see
Belgium as a tax haven?”...... Hollande’s tax, levied on incomes above one
million euros, has been a miserable failure. Over its lifespan, it raised
around $500 million, a tiny fraction of the original projections. Why? Well,
the Paris bureaucrats who made those projections overlooked something rather
important. Rich people don’t sit around waiting to be taxed. They have all
sorts of ways of beating the system, not necessarily involving accountants. The
two most straightforward forms of legal tax avoidance are earlier retirement
and emigration, and wealthy Frenchmen have made ample use of both. Parts of Kensington, an expensive district of
West London, are now largely Francophone. London is, on some measures, the
sixth-largest French city in the world......To Read More....
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