France taxes more than anyone in the world and nothing works

France is the world champion of public spending. With 57.2% of GDP allocated to state spending -almost an absolute record in the OECD, only surpassed by Finland this year, at 57.5-, it has built the most ambitious redistribution model ever attempted in a developed democracy.

But its hospitals are in crisis. Its schools are falling behind in all international rankings. Its infrastructure is aging. Its debt exceeds 110% of GDP. And its entrepreneurs or those who actually pay taxes are leaving the country due to excessively high taxation. France remains one of the countries in the world with the highest tax pressure, with 45.3% of GDP allocated to taxes and social contributions in 2024.

For an ordinary person, it is a total failure, but for the French left, we need more state and more taxes to solve this...

The French example is intellectually fascinating because it perfectly destroys the progressive argument. It is not a poor country that would not have the means to sustain a strong state. It is one of the six largest economies in the world, with one of the most well-funded administrations on the planet, that decided fifty years ago that taxing more would solve its social problems. But it doesn’t work...

The most clinical example remains the 75% tax on high incomes, established by President François Hollande in 2013. An emblematic campaign promise of the socialist candidate, a symbol of fiscal justice for millions of voters. But in two years of implementation, 260 million euros were collected (less than the administrative cost of the measure itself) and the policy caused an accelerated exodus of top executives, elite athletes, and entrepreneurs to Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. The measure was discreetly abandoned in 2014, but it remains a totem of the left, and “economists” like Thomas Piketty want higher taxation in the future.

Between 2000 and 2016, France lost an average of 10,000 wealthy taxpayers per year. The ISF, or the tax on high wealth, had caused, according to estimates from the French Ministry of Finance itself, 35 billion euros in capital flight over two decades. THIRTY-FIVE BILLION that did not create jobs, did not finance pensions, did not build hospitals. They simply changed countries. Currently, the French state debt is 3.5 billion euros, but well...

The left has an answer; they want to tax more, and better. Close tax loopholes, broaden the tax base, eliminate exceptions, tax companies and the wealthiest more... All of this ignores an empirical reality that economist Arthur Laffer formulated on a restaurant napkin in 1974. Beyond a certain threshold, raising tax rates reduces revenue. Capital is mobile, especially in the EU. The tax punishment does not retain it, but drives it away.

France is the real-world demonstration that the state can grow indefinitely without improving the services it is supposed to provide. Each failed reform generates a new administration tasked with overseeing the next one. Bureaucracy feeds on its own shortcomings and taxes taxpayers to finance its own growth. The problem in France is the excess of Socialism...

Argentines know this mechanism better than anyone. The name is different; for you, it is called Peronism or Kirchnerism, but the logic is identical. Promising justice through spending, financing debt with more debt, and presenting the bill to generations that have not yet voted.

France and Argentina share the same lesson: a state that grows to compensate for its failures does not correct them but institutionalizes them.