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French PM may scrap two public holidays to reduce country’s crippling debt
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Or, just tax the rich.
Right? Why is it always "make life harder for the working class" and never "make billionaires pay their fucking share"???
France has "only" 40 billionaires and also has the second-highest marginal tax rate in the EU at 55.4%. I know billionaires are the favourite whipping boy of the left and of Lemmy, and I support taxing them in general, but it won't fix this problem.
hahahahahaha!
That comment is going to be wildly unpopular.
For starters, ONE billionaire is too many. A billion is a ridiculous amount of money. Saying France has "only" 40 is so incredibly disconnected.
Nobody should be able to amass this level of wealth. And those who do, do it through sheer human exploitation and lack of ethics.
The fact that they get to have such incredible wealth while the rest of us are struggling to make ends meet, and governments need to cut social services due to lack of funding is criminal.
All the money is pooling into these peoples' hands and you're not asking yourself why? You don't think that taxing that amount of wealth even a little might help anything?
I'd really like to hear why.
Great, 40 billionaires means at least €40 billion can be reappropriated to the public right away. What a great start you’ve identified.
Since one of those is Bernard Arnault, we can get an extra 100 billion head start.
The rich structure their affairs so that they don't pay income tax, so that high marginal tax rate doesn't apply to them but instead hits mostly the upper middle class.
There's a whole industry for Tax-avoidance and even Tax-evasion catering for "high net worth individuals" (i.e. the rich).
Yeah and all of the global corporations worth hundreds of billions that do business there everyday without paying tax and obfuscating revenue through being "based somewhere else." We need a global corporate tax. Plain and simple.
Tax on what, labor income?
Because that is not what the rich live off. On the contrary it makes building wealth harder for the working class.
Also how do you arrive at 55.4%?
All I could find was a marginal income tax rate of up to 45% + an additional 3-4% for incomes over 250k.
https://fr.icalculator.com/income-tax-rates/2025.html
Are you adding social security as well?
There's a difference between having high marginal taxes on the rich, and actually collecting them
Do you want France to have tax agents as effective as the IRS?
I'm French. I want them 100 times more effective. You have no idea how much the rich French love tax optimization (and fraud -- it's been estimated to 100+ bn/year a few years ago).
The average fortune growth of the top 500 French families for the last 20 years is 14% a year. They can spare a dime.
Not to mention that I keep hearing stories about the IRS getting budget cuts. You guys just have a seemingly-mistaken impression that the IRS knows it all because they have citizens run the numbers while also doing the math themselves due to corporate lobbying from turbotax and the like, but it's actually a good thing when your tax office has good information. Y'all should concern yourselves with how politicians make them use it.
But they should reduce pensions because it only benefits older people who could be used for more research, defense and infrastructure.
If income increases, but you don't manage it well, the problem won't be solved.
Yeah, so imagine. Wild idea here, we tax the rich. To increase the income of the government. Who can invest in the working and middle class, who can then have disposable income to stimulate the economy. Just a crazy theory I have there that has been shown to work every time it's been implemented. Crazy right? It's been 50 fucking years, it doesn't trickle down Reagan.
why not just lift the age limit of pensions to 90, right?
Originally, pensions were only meant to provide incentives, because many people didn't reach that age. Now that there are so many older retirees, it's becoming a burden that, if not addressed, will be catastrophic for the government.
incentives for what? to pay taxes? are you implying that pension should go back to be a big scam on society?
the solution is certainly not to abolish the pension system. nobody wants to work when they can barely anymore, and this is not frostpunk or something to justify that.
of course, the money could go to wherever else to increase efficiency, or whatever. but hopefully the goal is not to make the most efficient society, where the "uncapable" (and also the non-exploitable-anymore) are left to suffer and die, but the most human society. otherwise we could just defund healthcare, all kinds of aids too, because they are just taking away resources from The Capables, right?
I think what matters more is wealth disparity not actual wealth when discussing countries outside of the US. How much more wealthy are they than the average person in their country. You can't just focus on wealth in terms of US dollars because there are parasites in each country with varying degrees of wealth in comparison to the average American billionaire.
The dollar is the global reserve currency, so yes, by default we focus in terms of US dollars. It is also American globalisation which created these people. There's this cool new thing thing called History we in Europe study, it allows for current events to be contextualised. It's a pretty hip thing with the kids, you can learn more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History.
Edit: There should not ever be an
In my opinion, the government shouldn't be offering services left and right, just what's necessary.
If people want freedom, that's fine, but the government isn't going to take on many responsibilities.
If people want comfort, that's fine, but they should follow the rules the government imposes.
Except after World War 2, when the economy worked and the middle class were able to exist and have a family with a single full time job whilst having 90% corporate tax for higher end earnings?
Or, during Reagan and Thatcherism which created the neoliberal nightmare that gave us the 2008 crash and put every single country in the world into debt we have never been able to escape and defined the future of the next 3 generations after GenX?
What about during Covid, when the world governments gifted billions to the ruling class through subsidies they never paid back?
The government imposed all of these. It's not freedom if there is no class mobility. Dynastic wealth is monarchy. Lick the shit off the boots, like a good citizen and jog on.
When someone says "billionaires," you can go ahead and include in that figure all those whose net worth is between 8 and 12 digits