Obama knows this, which is why he promised to bankrupt coal plants by imposing crushing taxes. Now France has decided it has too many rich people and financial transactions and has gone after them, doubling the tax on stock purchases and taking a knife to the throats of its wealthy.
France estimated that the doubling of the tax will bring in an additional 170 million euros in 2012 and 500 million euros next year. The state will start collecting the tax in November, Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac’s press office said.
It’s too bad that no one’s going to report next year on how much money this tax actually produces. That would be information of interest to everyone except the looters and their supporters in the press.
The transaction tax can only appeal to nitwit Democrats and the like. Back when Democrat lightweight David Dinkins was governing New York City under utopian principles and doing his best to wreck it, the idea was floated to have a transaction tax on share purchases on Wall Street.
Some intelligent person posed the question: would it take longer than a couple days to replace the NYSE with the New Jersey Stock Exchange?
“France estimated that the doubling of the tax will bring in an additional 170 million euros in 2012 and 500 million euros next year”
Fred2 (who has a French passport) estimates that France is full of crap and that “unexpectedly” people will change their behaviors to avoid this tax and the net result will be much *less* tax revenue. Certainly in an estimated sense and probably an absolute sense because while they are avoiding that tax, they will bother to avoid LOTS of others by structuring their investments correctly. This will cause economic activity in France to go down and unemployment to go up. There will be much hand-wringing at this unexpected consequence.