172
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.
France already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. Their main problem is the opposite: the tax system is too narrow. Generally, European welfare states function by levying high taxes on everyone. Problem with France is that they try to have a welfare state without taxing the middle class enough. For example, it levies 5% lower VAT than the Nordics, and grants lots more exemptions.
The cluelessness here is hilarious. The rich have all the money, they just don't want to pay. The entirety of the middle class makes a tiny fraction of what the rich who reap all the benefits do. The "welfare states" only exist because the rich have taken all the money that would have gone to their employees and allowed them to pay for the services that the government now provides. Generational wealth should be the norm, comfortable livings should be the bare minimum. The rich are still making all the money, they're richer than ever, they just aren't paying back into the system that provides them with immense wealth and protects it. They're freeloading pieces of shit and it's amazing that they have smooth-brained sycophants even among the poors that they exploit.
None of those parasitic gremlins would have anything if it weren't for the middle class generating it for them, both creating and consuming. Your completely insane solution is to attack the source of wealth rather than the leeches siphoning off the vast majority of it while putting in comparitively negligible effort. The middle class is sharing a dwindling portion of generated wealth as the rich get richer and here you are saying the solution is to make the middle class poorer still.
So no, the middle class should not be paying more to prop up the system that already gives almost all of the fruits of its labor to a small pack of assholes whose primary qualification is being born into enough money to already have the road to success paved for them, people who have no more intelligence or ability than the rest of us and who, if born into lower social strata, would not have the ability to leave it because of sabotage by people like you.
The ultra-rich don't earn their money, they just get it by dipping into our collective wallets. They can get a little bit less so the wheels on the bus keep spinning and allow the workers to continue providing them with private jets and collections of vacation homes.