The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.
Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has expensive education and health insurances?
The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.
"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."
Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.
Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.
"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."
Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.
"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."
Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy.
Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all).
Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.
Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."
This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.
Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here.
Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.
But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.
Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.
Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.
I don't believe that there is a single case in world history where increased family income did NOT reduce the number of children per family. Likewise with improvements in child mortality.
It is a very abstract term. It is like ”democracy”. Yes, you can clearly say that North Korea is not a democracy. But US? Well, depends on who you ask.
Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare state? Let’s take Poland as an example. When do they stop being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment payments, will they stop being a welfare state?
And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop existing because of demographics?
This is just derailing the topic from a french office suite into some sort of political statement about immigration. Looking at this green account's other two comments, it's all troll...
Let’s take Poland. They are a welfare state. They don’t have open borders for illegals. Not sure what you are talking about. Let me guess you are American who never set foot in Poland and just assume it has open borders?
> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!
As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.
What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.
I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.
The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.
If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.
But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.
You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong).
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]).
How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia?
And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left.
EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%.
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."
Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.
The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
None of what you've just said can be verified by looking at any of the references you just posted. However having just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay living in the UK.
So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France.
Considering the number of replies here saying "source does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions. Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions this thing is justifying to you
That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary
This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge
82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.
> That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").
> If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
> That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or to a private management company doesn't change the scheme or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.
There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's unrelated to my point.
> Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The key metric to me is the share of money collected that is paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems, it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].
How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I don’t how the numbers would add up to 82%.
> What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't?
Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes.
Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it.
Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge
What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ?
> 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state,
You literally can't read.
> In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage
> his means that an average married worker with two children in
France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage
Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,
How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.
Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.
See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.
It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.
They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.
You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.
Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"
This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.
What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?
Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.
This is all a fact.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
- https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151...
- https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
> You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare.
I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?
Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.
Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has expensive education and health insurances?
Hungary is a welfare state.
cracks fingers
The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.
"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."
Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.
Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.
"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."
Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.
"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."
Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy. Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all). Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.
Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."
This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.
Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here. Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.
"This is all a fact."
Sure thing buddy
> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"
But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.
Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.
Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
"Prosperity itself lowers fertility"
This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.
I don't believe that there is a single case in world history where increased family income did NOT reduce the number of children per family. Likewise with improvements in child mortality.
That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state.
Can you define it then? What point does it start and what point does it stop being a welfare state.
It is a very abstract term. It is like ”democracy”. Yes, you can clearly say that North Korea is not a democracy. But US? Well, depends on who you ask.
Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare state? Let’s take Poland as an example. When do they stop being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment payments, will they stop being a welfare state?
And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop existing because of demographics?
[flagged]
This is just derailing the topic from a french office suite into some sort of political statement about immigration. Looking at this green account's other two comments, it's all troll...
Let’s take Poland. They are a welfare state. They don’t have open borders for illegals. Not sure what you are talking about. Let me guess you are American who never set foot in Poland and just assume it has open borders?
> Which it can’t.
The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more.
(2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder...
(2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi...
> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!
As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.
What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.
I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.
The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.
If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.
But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.
You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong).
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]).
How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia?
And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France
[2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-...
[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557755186/ch05...
EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%.
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."
Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.
The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
82% tax wedge is not the same as taxes, or even the contribution of an individual.
Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more.
I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think of a whole different subset of people than you.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
None of what you've just said can be verified by looking at any of the references you just posted. However having just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay living in the UK.
So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France.
Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn’t exist.
> https:[...]?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Considering the number of replies here saying "source does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions. Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions this thing is justifying to you
> The French state spends 57% of all French
That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary
This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge
82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.
[1]: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
> That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").
> If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
> That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or to a private management company doesn't change the scheme or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.
There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's unrelated to my point.
> Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The key metric to me is the share of money collected that is paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems, it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].
[1]: https://www.securite-sociale.fr/dossiers/quels-sont-les-cout...
How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I don’t how the numbers would add up to 82%.
[2] You include pension, healthcare and education in this number. What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
> What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't?
Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes.
Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it.
Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge
What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ?
> 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state,
You literally can't read.
> In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage
> his means that an average married worker with two children in France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage
Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,
How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.
e.g.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payroll_...
taxes in Denmark are presumably several times higher than in France?
The subject is not employers, don't get sidetracked. I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either.
The initial claim is "82% of wages go to taxes", which is inaccurate, a lie and a bad faith argument.
Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.
See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.
It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.
They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.
You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.
Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.
> They're employer _contributions_ to the system
No, they are the taxes you pay that are not shown on your payslip.
> They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population
Yes, you as a worker pay it.
> back into the salary should it go away
It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.
No, they're not. As a proof, should my employer stop paying them, _my wages will not rise to match what they stopped paying_.
>It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.
Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"
This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.
What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?