Most evidence suggests that wealth taxes levied in the past have indeed reduced inequality and have not led to the type of tax avoidance their detractors would suggest.
"Complexity is one reason European countries, including France, Germany and Sweden, abandoned broad-based wealth taxes. Many of the rich dodged wealth taxes by exploiting carve-outs or moving. The very rich will find ways to avoid confiscatory taxes, but bad tax policy distorts investment.
Sweden abolished its wealth tax in 2007 following an exodus of capital and business tycoons. France repealed its net wealth tax in 2018, estimating that some 10,000 people with 35 billion euros worth of assets had left in the previous 15 years for tax reasons. The government was losing revenue from income taxes that the wealthy would have paid."
Sure, some people will move their assets around in order to avoid wealth taxes (to which there are, of course, solutions). That being said, in France revenue from the wealth tax grew at more than twice the rate of GDP from 1990-2018. Which means that even though some people were avoiding the tax, and oversight was extremely lax, there's no evidence that it was being serially evaded. And this is in the context of the European Union, perhaps the most hostile environment to wealth taxes that you can imagine given the free flows of people and capital.
First, I assume the estimates on capital flight in the WSJ are based on Pichet's 2007 paper, which makes a number of huge assumptions to arrive at its estimate. This isn't necessarily a criticism, more a statement that there isn't a lot of good evidence and other approaches to estimation yield much more modest sums.
Second, the article does not say that "the wealth taxes generated less revenue than the ordinary income taxes would have." It says that "the government was losing revenue from income taxes that the wealthy would have paid." There isn't a comparison there. Sure, the government was losing some revenue from income taxes, but nothing on the order of magnitude of the revenue brought in by the ISF. Those who are extremely wealthy actually do not tend to pay much in income taxes, especially outside of the US where top salaries are significantly lower.
Third, the assertion of widespread capital flight in France is provably false. If we look at French national accounts, the larger a fortune (and therefore the greater percentage of which is made up of financial assets), the more it grew relative to smaller estates (which are predominantly composed of property). Under the hypothesis of capital flight, we'd expect to see exactly the opposite.
Fourth, the effectiveness of the wealth tax had nothing to do with its repeal - it had to do, in large part, with the specific politics of the internationalist-global coalition that Macron spearheaded.
Fifth, even if capital flight becomes an important concern (and I do believe it is important, simply not at the level that is often cited), there are plenty of ways it can be circumvented, especially given the very different dynamics of the US tax system and the US place in the world.
> the article does not say that "the wealth taxes generated less revenue than the ordinary income taxes would have."
The loss of income tax revenue from the departure of the wealthy was twice as much as the revenue generated from the wealth tax from all of those who didn't leave. Therefore the tax was a net negative, hurting French finances to the tune of 7 billion euros of lost revenue as a result of the tax[2]
"The revenue it raised was rather paltry; only a few billion euros at its peak, or about 1% of France’s total revenue from all taxes. At least 10,000 wealthy people left the country to avoid paying the tax; most moved to neighboring Belgium, which has a large French-speaking population. When these individuals left, France lost not only their wealth tax revenue but their income taxes and other taxes as well. French economist Eric Pichet estimates that this ended up costing the French government almost twice as much revenue as the total yielded by the wealth tax."[1]
> Those who are extremely wealthy actually do not tend to pay much in income taxes, especially outside of the US
In France they certainly do, but they did not pay much in wealth taxes due to the difficulty in collecting the tax.
And here we have the main problem. Perhaps there is debate about how many tax refugees left and how much capital left the country -- that's fine.
But is the purpose of the tax to hurt the rich or is the purpose of the tax to raise money?
There is no debate about how much money the tax raised, regardless of whether you agree with Pichet's study. The money raised is known and was just 5.2 billion euros in 2015[2]. For all of France - a nation whose 2015 GDP was 2.2 Trillion euros. And this was a tax valued at 0.5% for all wealth above 1.3 million and an extra 1% for wealth above 10 million euros (so two rates of .5% and 1.5%). So even if you disagree that the net effect was negative because you don't agree with Pichet's methodology, there is no disputing the tax was ineffective at raising money.
