Finie la douceur de vivre en France. Maintenant, il faut payer, beaucoup, pour avoir l'honneur d'être Français...
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2012 - editorial
Le Tax Fairness
A French court says the 75% tax rate doesn't mistreat everyone equally.
It turns out that, 220 years later, the French Revolution has something to contribute to mankind other than a warning about bloody ideological passions. In a ruling loaded with arguments from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, France's Constitutional Court on Saturday invalidated the new 75% top French tax rate on grounds of—get this—unfairness.
The 75% rate on incomes above €1 million is Socialist President François Hollande's signature economic proposal, and the opposition had challenged its legality on grounds that it is "confiscatory." That much would seem obvious, but the French court said it didn't need to reach a decision on the confiscatory question because the tax didn't meet the minimum requirement that it be applied equally.
Specifically, the court found that the tax didn't take into consideration the needs and income of an entire household, as opposed to the individual earner, and thus the tax "has violated the requirement to take into account the ability to pay" and "infringed on the principle of equality before public burdens."
In other words, a household with two people earning a little under €1 million would not be subject to the tax, while an individual making even a dollar more than €1 million would have to pay. So while it is fair to take 75% of what someone earns, it isn't fair unless the law confiscates 75% from all rich households equally. Come to think of it, that sort of social and economic leveling was the point of the French Revolution.
Alas, no government heads are likely to roll after the narrow ruling, which Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault quickly dismissed as a mere inconvenience on the road to true tax equity. He said the government will merely change some details to accommodate the ruling, and the "exceptional contribution," as the 75% rate is known, will return to confiscate again. So in the end the court ruling may only mean that the 75% rate will apply to even more French citoyens than the 1,500 or so originally anticipated.
Or at least those citizens who decide to stay in France. Unlike Americans, a Frenchman can escape the tax guillotine by moving out of the country. Gerard Depardieu has already moved over the Belgian border, and the actor says the court's ruling has changed nothing as far as he's concerned.
The real revolution will have to wait until the French figure out that there aren't enough rich left in France to finance their modern welfare-entitlement state.
A version of this article appeared December 31, 2012, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Le Tax Fairness.
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