Before California, France tried a wealth tax. Macron repealed it after rich people fled the country instead of paying

In November, Californians will vote on the state’s proposed tax on billionaires, which, if passed, will slap a one-off 5% levy on the total wealth of residents worth more than $1 billion. Critics have warned that such an imposition will spark capital flight as wealthy people decide to simply uproot, as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have already started to do. A look across the Atlantic, where another broad wealth tax experiment was implemented across two decades, suggests these concerns might not be completely unfounded.