Comment justifier une augmentation impopulaire des droits de succession

The recent debate on wealth or capital taxation, which focuses on ?lifetime taxation?, has failed to produce any reasonable consensus. By contrast, our approach aims at rehabilitating a renovated form of albeit more and more unpopular taxes on wealth transfers. The program Taxfinh (Tax family inheritances) combines two inseparable components : heavier, highly progressive taxes on family inheritances only ? excluding inter vivos transfers and charitable bequests ; and providing more numerous and easier means to sidestep this new tax, thus encouraging people to make inter vivos gifts or donations (to their children or to charities) or to consume their wealth during their old age. This program has many advantages compared to traditional estate tax, and should be less unpopular, more equitable and less distortionary. More importantly, it appears the appropriate response to the unprecedented, clearly harmful, wealth situation in countries like France, owing notably to the rising age of inheritance. Our contention is that this program could be first implemented without too much damage in France alone, thus serving as an example to other countries, whereas annual taxes on the ownership of wealth call much more for close international fiscal cooperation, difficult to establish.