Why? The rich can easily diversify where there money is located, so their country being invaded wouldn't impact their wealth to much. They can also flee more readily than anyone else as they probably have their own jet. It would protect their nice house(s) in that country, but how much is insurance from invasion worth...
> Why? The rich can easily diversify where there money is located
Because you want to be in Paris. We’re also entering another xenophobic era. There is an argument to be made that the safest place for a Frenchman is probably in France. (Obvious counterpoints to that. And I’m speaking as an immigrant American.)
That might be the stated reason. It attempts to increase the overall tax take by increasing personal taxes on the rich, which will allow a new generation of bureaucrats and economists to re-learn the lessons that are already in the textbooks.
You know that the Laffer curve has basically no empirical support, right? Like it seemed to apply at really high levels of marginal tax (75%+) but there's been no replication at any lower levels.
The only economist I still here talking about it is Laffer, for obvious reasons.
If you are really pointing out the lack of conclusive evidence for the effects of a single factor in a complex real-world economy, you may have spent too many years in education playing with models and simulations, and too few years in the real world.
> If you are really pointing out the lack of conclusive evidence for the effects of a single factor in a complex real-world economy, you may have spent too many years in education playing with models and simulations, and too few years in the real world.
That's some quality assumptions you're making there, but whatevs.
You're the person who brought up the Laffer curve. Apparently (so Wikipedia tells me) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (section income tax rate as which revenue is maximised) around 65% is the point at which taxes stop being as effective.
That's interesting to me as I would have thought it was lower.
Note that because of how economics work, this number is from correlational data so is probably not as robust as an experimental approach might be (but unfortunately that's basically impossible to implement).
Both the French and the Brits have nukes. They're at no risk of hostile foreign invasion and everybody knows it. Entire libraries of books and whitepapers have been written about it.
If it were about self-defense: Build more nukes, build some mobile launchers capable of also launching targeting satellites, maintain the missile and submarine fleets, and your job is done. This can be done on current military budgets, or even smaller budgets.
It's not for "self defense". It's for foreign adventurism and geopolitical posturing. Like the opposite of realpolitik.
Besides, waging proxy wars is very far removed from self-defense.
Building outposts in, e.g., Cameroon to ward against Russian aggression over there is perhaps justifiable in some abstract respect, but it's rather the opposite of self-defense. (Without getting into complicated game-theoretical "we have to stop them over there so we don't fight them over here" justifications, which have long been discredited and have even become something of a joke.)
