Accused of being a “tax on the virtue” of parents who have saved their entire lives, or of being a “tax on death”, inheritance taxes are not very popular in public opinion. According to an Odoxa survey for the magazine Challenges published on April 25, 84% of French people want parents to transmit “as much heritage as possible for their children” and 77% find that this tax is unjustified.
A disenchantment which confirms a 2022 study by OpinionWay for The echoes, which concluded that 81% of French people were against an increase in inheritance taxes. For some, inheritance taxes should simply be abolished, as Sweden did twenty years ago, or at least reduced.
However, although they arouse rejection, inheritance taxes affect a minority of taxpayers. According to INSEE, in 2018, only 14.6% of parents transmitted inheritances greater than 100,000 euros and were therefore subject to inheritance tax. This low level leads some to say that inheritance contributes to inequalities. In France, 60% of assets come from inheritances. A heritage which is distributed very unequally: while 50% of French people will inherit less than 70,000 euros, the 1% of the best-off beneficiaries receive on average 4.2 million euros net of rights.
In a note from the Economic Analysis Council called “ Rethinking legacy », published at the end of 2021, Clément Dherbécourt, Gabrielle Fack, Camille Landais and Stefanie Stantcheva estimated that “if the mass of accumulated wealth increases rapidly, it is not entirely consumed over the course of life, a significant part being transmitted to future generations. As a result, inheritance is once again becoming a determining factor in the constitution of wealth: inherited wealth now represents 60% of total wealth compared to 35% on average at the start of the 1970s. This trend is common to all developed countries, but it seems particularly strong in France”.
Vast reform
The legacy “carries with it the risk of a profound disruption of equality of opportunity, the cardinal value of democratic societies and the condition of their possibility of existence in the long term”they judged.
Announced many times, a vast reform of inheritance taxes no longer seems to be on the agenda. At most, the government would consider restricting the Dutreil tax relief system for the benefit of family business transfers.
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