Tracing the full path of money
I want to walk you through a simple example, because it shows why our country needs to change how it makes decisions.
When we hear about a 2% tax on estates above 100 million euros, the instinctive reaction can be to find it reasonable. We picture enormous fortunes. We hear that the tax could raise 20 billion euros. We tell ourselves that money could come back to the French people.
I understand that reaction. But governing a country isn't just about watching the money that lands in the State's coffers. It means tracing the full path of that money — before the tax, during the tax, and after the tax.
Wealth isn't always cash on hand
A large estate isn't always a bank account full of ready cash. That wealth might be a company, shares, a factory, a brand, machinery, patents, a network of suppliers — a working asset that is valuable precisely because it produces, employs, and grows, yet doesn't necessarily throw off, every year, the cash needed to cover the tax owed.
Picture a company valued at 1 billion euros. With a 2% tax, 20 million euros must be found each year. If the owner has 20 million euros in cash on hand, they pay it.
But if most of their wealth is tied up in the company, they have to find that money elsewhere. They can sell some shares. They can draw more cash out of the business. They can borrow. They can shift part of their income to another country, wherever EU or international law allows it.
Consequences throughout the economic chain
At that point, the money changes course. And when money changes course, the consequences don't fall only on the person paying the tax. They also reach employees, suppliers, subcontractors, regions, local authorities, and ultimately jobs.
Money used to pay a tax doesn't appear from nowhere. Sometimes it comes out of an investment that will no longer happen. Out of an order that gets postponed. Out of a supplier who receives less work. Out of a project that gets delayed. Out of a job that never gets created. France can no longer vote through a tax by looking only at the first line of the calculation.
It has to look at the whole chain. That is the mistake made by those who look only at the tax itself.
A country is not a tax return
Some experts are very good at calculating a tax. They know how to set a rate, a threshold, a taxable base, a projected yield. That's useful. But it isn't enough to govern a country.
A country is not a tax return. A country is an entire household. There are businesses. There are employees. There are suppliers. There are families. There are local authorities. There is the State. And there are also those who lend money to France.
When you turn off a tap in one room, you have to make sure the water doesn't run out somewhere else in the house. It works exactly the same way with money. A tax can bring revenue into the State's coffers while at the same time taking money away from the population and eroding trust. That is why I refuse decisions driven purely by emotion.
Emotion can point to an injustice. But it isn't enough, on its own, to tell us whether a response truly fixes the problem or creates an even bigger one.
The risk of concentrating wealth
There is a risk we don't talk about enough. A wealth tax can sometimes concentrate wealth even further instead of spreading it more evenly.
If someone has to sell shares to pay the tax, we have to ask who is in a position to buy them. Hardly ever employees. Hardly ever small savers. Hardly ever local residents. The buyers tend to be those who already have plenty of cash on hand — large funds, large groups, foreign buyers, fortunes that are already well established.
The result is damaging. Money that used to circulate within France circulates there less. France may gain a line of tax revenue, but it can lose part of the economic circulation that kept French businesses running.
Raising 20 billion euros in tax is the equivalent of 20 billion euros less landing in the bank accounts of working French people.
A capital tax of this kind requires concentrating wealth among those who must pay it — that is, increasing the wealth of a very small number of people so they can afford to pay these taxes. Those billions are raised at the expense of the working population, with serious knock-on costs we have already begun to pay simply from discussing the introduction of a 2% wealth tax.
Effects on subcontracting and employment
If part of that sum touches French contracts, France could be exposed to a loss of more than 5.8 billion euros in subcontracting work. Using a simple benchmark of 8 jobs per 1 million euros of contracts, that comes to as many as 46,400 jobs at risk.
I am not saying that 46,400 jobs vanish overnight. I am saying the equivalent of 46,400 jobs could become more precarious, more uncertain, easier to relocate, or harder to create in the first place.
That is the reality of an interconnected system. A decision made in Paris can hit a supplier in Lyon, a design firm in Nantes, an IT contractor in Lille, an accounting firm in Toulouse, a factory in Burgundy, a family business in Brittany, or a subcontractor in the overseas territories.
A country's image comes at a price
There is also another cost. It never appears on a bill, yet the French pay it all the same. It is the price of trust. When the French State borrows, it sells debt to investors. To put it simply, imagine France approaching a bank to borrow over ten years.
If the bank trusts it, it lends at a normal rate. If it has doubts, it charges more. France is benchmarked against Germany, since Germany is generally seen as the safer bet by lenders. The gap between what France pays and what Germany pays captures part of the trust gained or lost.
Before the political crisis that broke out in 2024, that gap stood at around 53 basis points. Afterward, it climbed to around 74 basis points — a difference of 21 basis points, or 0.21%.
That might sound small. But France borrows hundreds of billions of euros. On the 310 billion euros of borrowing planned for 2026, 0.21% works out to roughly 651 million euros in extra interest a year.
That 651 million euros is money that doesn't go to hospitals, schools, the justice system, local authorities, security, or investment. It is the price of distrust.
What this could cost the French
Let's look now at the visible costs in this example. Economic uncertainty could account for about 6 billion euros in lost or delayed national wealth. The rise in the cost of debt could add roughly 651 million euros a year.
Business investment could be delayed by about 3.1 billion euros. Exposed French subcontracting could reach about 5.8 billion euros under the scenario described. The visible total comes to roughly 15.6 billion euros.
With around 69.1 million inhabitants, that works out to about 225 euros per French person. That isn't a bill that lands in anyone's mailbox — it's a loss of national wealth: less investment, fewer orders, less trust, fewer projects, and less money available for public services.
Over 5 years, that could add up to roughly 78 billion euros, or about 1,130 euros per French person. Over 10 years, it could reach roughly 156 billion euros, or about 2,260 euros per French person. And this calculation doesn't capture everything.
It doesn't count the jobs that will never be created. It doesn't count the factories that won't be built. It doesn't count the contracts that will go elsewhere. It doesn't count the businesses that will hold off before investing. It doesn't count the corporate headquarters that will hesitate. It doesn't count the trust that will take years to rebuild.
What I want to change
I am not saying large fortunes shouldn't contribute. Quite the opposite. But there are other approaches that would allow for a far larger transfer of wealth than the 2% levied on estates — a levy that would make some people even wealthier in net-worth terms while shrinking the money available to actually pay the tax.
Of the 20 billion euros the 2% tax is meant to bring in, only a fraction will ever reach the French — possibly none at all, given the state of the national debt. It would do nothing for purchasing power, let alone help rebuild wealth for working people. A transfer of wealth worth several hundred billion euros to the population is achievable without harming how the economy functions, and without the State watching the cost of its debt spike from a loss of trust.
We can get large fortunes to contribute substantially without driving them away, by soundly organizing the country's overall system so that money flows mainly in a different direction.
If a tax is billed as raising 20 billion euros, but its visible effects could cost 15.6 billion euros, only 4.4 billion euros are left over — before even counting the hidden losses. If this tax ultimately raises only 2.5 billion euros, as some cautious estimates suggest, the country could end up losing around 13.1 billion euros in wealth, a cost the population would have to bear.
My method
This is why I talk about sound governance. Before voting on a tax, I want to trace the money: where it comes from, what it was doing beforehand, who ends up receiving less afterward, who loses a contract, who sells part of a company, who buys it, what extra the State pays on its debt, what businesses postpone, and what the French actually receive in the end. That is my method. I do not want to govern by the emotion of the moment. I want to govern by what is real. Anger can point to a problem. It cannot, on its own, build a solution.
I want taxation that serves a purpose — taxation that gets those who should contribute to do so, without choking off investment, without driving decision-making centers out of France, without weakening subcontractors, without concentrating wealth even further, and without leaving the French with a hidden bill.
France needs decisions that make sense in real life and that don't end up costing the population money some other way.