IThere is no worse policy than that which feeds on the state of ignorance of public opinion in order to better free itself from the facts by flattering the so-called “common sense”. The first proposals of the candidates for the presidential election of 2022 in terms of inheritance rights fall into this pitfall. They maintain pretense without tackling the only subject that should guide public policies in this area: guaranteeing equal opportunities.
Inheritance is a highly inflammable political object, which affects both our relationship to money, death, descent, as well as an equivocal conception of the merit of the one who gives, as of the one who receives. . Seeking to tax what is within the purview of the intimate, in the name of a society less rigid in terms of social mobility, has so far hit a real wall.
The rehashed arguments ad nauseam always revolve around two themes. On the one hand, the inheritance tax would amount to taxing a second time what has already been subject to tax, and on the other hand, by what right would the State take the fruit of a lifetime of labor? patiently amassed? The debate is however more complex than these two clichés suggest. Under the pretext of defending work, they allow rents to prosper and inequalities to widen, while avoiding looking at the obvious: the tax on transmissions is, for the most part, a business of the very rich, of whom 99% of the population remain the consenting spectators.
Distorting mirror
If the French are turning their attention to inheritance rights, it is above all out of ignorance. All the surveys point in the same direction: collectively we have an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate the effective rates applied, and to systematically overestimate the threshold for exemption from duties. The effects of this distorting mirror are aggravated by true schizophrenia. Gladly egalitarian when it comes to guaranteeing the fate of our children over that of others, we remain allergic to the taxation of what we can pass on to our descendants.
In fact, the vast majority of French people inherit sums so small that they escape any taxation. Thus, less than one in five estates exceeds 100,000 euros, while one in two is less than 30,000 euros, according to INSEE. At the other end of the spectrum, 800 individuals inherit an average of 13 million euros.
A fascinating note from Economic Analysis Council (CAE) entitled “Rethinking the heritage” takes the opposite view of many received ideas. Several lessons emerge. The first is that France has once again become a society of heirs in which 60% of the overall heritage comes from inheritance (ie a doubling in fifty years). The transmissions thus fuel an accumulation of private capital, which has returned to levels equivalent to those of 1914, annihilating the redistributive effects that the two world wars and the crisis of 1929 had had.
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