This is for self defense. The rich would benefit massively from that.
Because you want to be in Paris. We’re also entering another xenophobic era. There is an argument to be made that the safest place for a Frenchman is probably in France. (Obvious counterpoints to that. And I’m speaking as an immigrant American.)
Paris isn’t Paris if Moscow invades.
The only economist I still here talking about it is Laffer, for obvious reasons.
That's some quality assumptions you're making there, but whatevs.
You're the person who brought up the Laffer curve. Apparently (so Wikipedia tells me) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (section income tax rate as which revenue is maximised) around 65% is the point at which taxes stop being as effective.
That's interesting to me as I would have thought it was lower.
Note that because of how economics work, this number is from correlational data so is probably not as robust as an experimental approach might be (but unfortunately that's basically impossible to implement).
Both the French and the Brits have nukes. They're at no risk of hostile foreign invasion and everybody knows it. Entire libraries of books and whitepapers have been written about it.
If it were about self-defense: Build more nukes, build some mobile launchers capable of also launching targeting satellites, maintain the missile and submarine fleets, and your job is done. This can be done on current military budgets, or even smaller budgets.
It's not for "self defense". It's for foreign adventurism and geopolitical posturing. Like the opposite of realpolitik.
Besides, waging proxy wars is very far removed from self-defense.
Building outposts in, e.g., Cameroon to ward against Russian aggression over there is perhaps justifiable in some abstract respect, but it's rather the opposite of self-defense. (Without getting into complicated game-theoretical "we have to stop them over there so we don't fight them over here" justifications, which have long been discredited and have even become something of a joke.)