There are moments when one wonders how much cynicism a society can really bear. 2025 is one of those moments. The French Senate is debating a tax that can hardly be called radical: 2 percent. A paltry two percent on assets exceeding 100 million euros. And yet, a privileged elite is outraged as if it were expropriation or class warfare.
Two percent: it is less than annual inflation. It is less than what every ordinary worker pays every day when they get up, work, consume, and live. Two percent: it is the drop that a billionaire would not even notice, while the welfare state withers before their eyes.
How far has this society moved away from the idea of justice if even a minimal contribution from the richest to the common good is already considered “harassment”? If lobbyists and liberal think tanks reflexively argue with the “high performers,” a term that has long since become a mocking cliché. Who is really sustaining performance here? The millionaire heir on his yacht off Monaco? Or the elderly care worker who ruins her health and goes home with €1,800 gross?
Gabriel Zucman is right: tax law has been undermined, manipulated and twisted for decades. Not by the poorest. But by the smartest, richest and most influential. Those who can afford an army of advisers to avoid paying taxes. Those who have their assets immunized through holdings, foundations and shell companies. Those who have long considered themselves untouchable.
And whenever someone says: Let us at least achieve symbolic justice, then the outcry echoes through the talk shows: “That drives away investors!”, “That endangers entrepreneurship!”, “That is social envy!”. No. It is moral hygiene. It is the attempt to restore balance in a world that has long been out of joint.
2 percent: that is not much. But it is a beginning. It is a sign that democracy is defending itself against the progressive stripping of state power by the private power of capital. That we do not accept everything. That we still know what solidarity means.
Anyone who owns hundreds of millions in this country has also benefited hundreds of thousands of times: from infrastructure, the rule of law, the workforce and peace. They owe something to society. And if they do not understand that, then the problem is not the tax. But their arrogance.
A commentary by P.T.