France is staring at a fiscal standoff that feels less like governance and more like extortion. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has been told he cannot pass a budget or even remain in office without Socialist backing. Their price is blunt: a new “Zucman tax,” two percent annually on assets above one hundred million euros Reuters.
Polls show eighty-six percent of voters back the idea, and the headlines celebrate it as a democratic victory. But popularity does not make a policy work. France already carries the highest tax burden in Europe. Investment has slowed for years, and business leaders warn this plan would suffocate what little dynamism remains. History is clear on what happens when governments impose annual wealth levies: the wealthy migrate, capital shrinks, and the middle class is left holding the bill.
What a headline, France already has absurd tax burden, the highest in Europe, yet the lefts scream for even more taxes.
Reality is, wealth tax always leads to emigration of entrepreneurs reducing tax revenue and increasing unemployment.
It won’t work, will the lefts get it? pic.twitter.com/2NfLJuFwZf
— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) September 25, 2025
The Netherlands provides a preview of how destructive these measures can become. There, a so-called wealth tax already strips more than two percent a year from everything above fifty-seven thousand euros. Not just luxury estates, but cash, shares, and even modest savings accounts. Beginning January, the rate will rise to 2.8 percent and the exemption will drop to fifty-one thousand, the cost of an ordinary car. A tax once sold as a way to capture fortunes now bleeds households that only managed to save a little.
France risks the same trap. At first, the Zucman tax looks targeted, with its high threshold. But once infrastructure exists to skim private assets each year, the logic of expansion is irresistible. Deficits persist. Politicians promise fairness. The burden spreads. And with each round, the productive class either moves abroad or stops building at all.
Supporters will claim the revenue is necessary, that the alternative is collapse. Yet the real collapse comes after the applause, when entrepreneurs stop hiring, investors stop funding, and new businesses stop forming. What begins as a two percent skim on billionaires metastasizes into a slow suffocation of the economy itself.
Eighty-six percent of voters may cheer today. The number that matters will be the one revealed in a few years, when unemployment rises and growth evaporates. France is not solving its budget crisis. It is mortgaging its future.
