French 'Millionaire's Tax' Gets Constitutional Go-Ahead

Agent_286, I like your article but I have to disagree with your interpretation.

The Socialist government has since reworked the tax to levy it on companies instead, raising the ire of entrepreneurs. Under its new design, which the council found constitutional, the tax will be a 50 percent levy on the portion of wages above 1 million euros in 2013 and 2014.

It is a tax on companies who offer excessive wage packages. That is the uniqueness of the tax. It is a method to make companies to think twice about what they pay their executives. It doesn't stop them from being stupid but it makes them pay for their stupidity.

We could try that in the U S and it would be constitutional. The goal is to stop outrageous compensations while closing the wage gap.

 

This doesn't happen. The wealthy have worked for years to get where they are today. They are deeply connected to local professional, social, business, cultural, educational, religious, charitable, and even recreational networks that they have painstakingly built and maintained over all those years. The fantasy of the propaganda-spewing disinformation media is that these folks are suddenly going to pull up stakes, throw over the work of a lifetime, and move to some no-account hinterland dorf over a few extra cents in taxation. The whole notion is simply ridiculous.

 

Yes it does. There is no fixed pie. Anyone who claims there is publicly is a demagogue trying to start a class war.

Marginal rate does not equal effective rate.

The top can grow as the bottom does. In fact that is always the case. The gap doesn't matter, just how low the floor is.

 

I would do surgery for $50 an hour. I would not get hurt but others would. I would box any heavyweight for any amount of money. I am not that stupid but, I guess, others are. Greed make many people do stupid things.

 

They don't move. Their income does.

This is also why there is no reason to have a business tax. Foreigners respond to incentive too.

 

No one would pay you that much for it. But they would gladly pay someone else tens times that. Put that in your income equality socialist pipe and smoke it.

You might not a chance at the title, but others do. Why dictate their lives to them? It is their body after all.

 

You don't have the answer to ANY question, do you? Just piles of unrelated blather. Revenons à nos moutons: How can the wealthy have these fantastic ablities to evade future taxes laid against them when they quite plainly lack an ability to evade the considerable tax burdens currently laid against them? Either dance with the devil or admit that you are a powerless coward.

 

The top 1% of households have 42% of the financial wealth and pay less than an effective tax rate of 35%.

 

If you do not own stock in a company, what is your basis for having a say in any executive's pay?

That is not what would happen anyway. If there were a arbitrary line drawn for the ration of executive pay, the wage gap would be closed by massive firings of part-time and low wage workers and you would see our manufacturing base further erode as jobs were shipped overseas. You would see more outsourced labor working as contractors for companies with little to no benefits with the same person heading up multiple companies, and you would see other such shell games as no matter where you draw your feel-good line, there will be a way around it.

I find it interesting that those who talk about really high stated income tax rates in the past don't spend a lot of time discussing what the effective tax rate was in the past though.

 

LOL! US citizens are taxed on their global income, no matter where they reside or where that income is earned.

Update: The incentive that businesses respond to in making location decisions is long-term profitability, the prospects for which are a function of dozens of often conflicting variables, among which taxation is one of the least significant or influential. You don't seem to have spent much time looking into any of this. Or perhaps you are just over-tired from all this holiday partying and are simply not capable of expressing yourself properly.

 

What do you call offshoring money? Outsourcing business?


Keep acting like I haven't put that forward.

Answer me on the normal taxation of government bonds. Is it lower?

Obama paid only 18% on his millions last year. What is the marginal rates in America again?

 

What is the tax rate on a cayman holding corporation?

40% of your profits is a lot of profits. You are lying to yourself if you don't think that is valuable to business. The ability to reinvest all profits would certainly create more expansion, moves and start ups. Why do you think they have tax incentives to do things? You don't own your own business do you?

 

Wealth isn't income. Try again. The 1% paying more then a third isn't fair enough? Good god you are greedy.

 

Do NOT let her get away with that tired lie. Not only where there many more deductions (and not just deductions, but shelters), but this 90% rate to which the liberals lovingly refer (and never ever would think to pay themselves ) didn't kick in until a MUCH higher level of income: a level so high, in fact, that nearly no one ever GOT there.

It's a leftist canard.

 

This^ and the only reasons are a) dishonest debate, b) hardcore brain scrubbing which makes them impervious to contrarian argument, or c) not as intelligent as they keep telling us they are d) all of the above.

 

Tell them we will go back to those exact tax codes when they go back to spending less then revenue in the same way Ike did and pay down the debt and keep total government down at 25% wof GDP state local and federal just like Ike left it. If they want those economics lets do the whole thing I am game.

 

Why does your post not include the level of income (inflation adjusted) at which the top marginal rates kicked in? Along with the differences then and now wrt to deductibility, hedges and shelters?

 

Totally and completely agree.

 

The government always has a say in who can be taxed. I think that SCOTUS only says that it has to be applied evenly.

Now France's government is not having a say in what an executive can be paid. It is taxing all companies equally for stupidity.

Again nobody is rationing executive pay. A stretch might be that the government is rationing stupidity.

Where do you get this nonsense. Why would less expenditure on executive salaries cause massive firings? And I always hear that it is high labor costs that send jobs overseas. Less executive pay would lower labor costs.

Right wing talking points do not fit every situation.

Again how does less executive pay cause more contractors? Why would it mean more CEOs running multiple companies.

Sorry, your logic escapes me.

Well, that came out of nowhere. I have only discussed that the top 1% should have an effective tax rate above 35%, especially if they have 42% of the financial wealth. I do not care what the actual tax rate is but that the effective tax rate should be over 35%.

The effective tax rate for someone making $1 million income today was 72.7% in 1963. In 2012, it was 32.7%

http://qz.com/74271/income-tax-rates-since-1913/

 

I don't think a Rolls-Royce is worth the money some spend to buy them. but do I try to keep people from buying them. It is none of your dam business what someone will pay for someone's labor that is their choice

 

Absolutely not when they were paying an effective rate of 37% in 1979. If you have the wealth (42%), you should pay more than 32.7% in an effective tax rate in 2012.

 

ROFLMAO

Nobody is worth more than $50/hour?

Where the flock did you get that added notion from?

- - - Updated - - -

You don't qualify for that level of taxation, do you?

 

It is something I have heard discussed before on NPR--that right wing talking points station. There is no easy way to correlate executive pay with a part-time worker in the same company. While it may be conceptually easy thing to say, it would be extremely difficult for companies to actually implement a tracking system. The end result is that low paid workers will go off book in some way or the other to bring down the official payroll gap. If Company X wants to close the gap, they simply outsource all low wage work done to Company Y whose checks will be issued by Company Y while all management will be paid by Company X. It is just a simple variation on what temp/employment agencies already do. A relative works for a company where about 1/3 of the people working are employees of an employment company and not the business where the work is actually done already.

Regardless, I have no say it what the wages of any company I do not have a stock interest in, and nor would I expect one, and nor do I care what the executive wages of the companies I do invest in are. I do not lust after other people's money or things. I try to take advantage of the opportunities as they come and blame nobody for my lot in life, nor obsess about anyone else's better fortune.

 

They'll move like Tiger and LeBron did. If they are minorities, they won't be treated as bad as Phil Mickelson was.

 

LOL. If I make $200 an hour, I too am getting a share. You see, that salary or share I'm getting is because my work is bettering the company. If my share doubles profits because our work sells, then we can hire more people and give them a share because we are being successful.

Is that too fast for you?