Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The best laid plan of Socialist French President Francois Hollande (pronounced O-Lend) to tap millionaires with a 75 percent tax appears to be falling asunder. Popular French actor Gérard Depardieu recently moved to Belgium, nearly within spitting distance of France, to escape France’s new 75 per cent top marginal income tax rate imposed on millionaires, as noted here in Connecticut Commentary . M. Depardieu took the additional precaution of acquiring Russian citizenship, but this was intended, some suppose, to spite the lesser socialistic pretentions of M. Hollande. Now, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be following in M. Depardieu’s footsteps. According to a piece in the UK’s Daily Mail on Line , M. Sarkozy is hightailing it to London along with his lovely wife Carla Bruni.

Gérard Depardieu, the French actor who moved to Belgium recently to escape the confiscatory 75 per cent top marginal income tax rate imposed on millionaires by newly elected French President   François Hollande, is at least as “French” as the Eiffel Tower. And his background points to a proletarian upbringing. When another of France’s sons – in fact, the richest man in the country, Bernard Arnault, the CEO and chief shareholder of the luxury behemoth LVMH – kicked the socialist dust of France from his A. Testoni Moro monk-strap shoes and moved to Belgium to escape the depredations visited upon him by M. Hollande, the first socialist President of France since François Mitterrand left office, the left wing Libération expressed its contempt for the rich in a headline on its front page: “Get lost, you rich b------.”