If you add up all the taxes in France, income tax, social charges, TVA, and a tax on everything you possess for people having a new worth over $75,000, including their home, taxes are over 60% for middle class working people.
“If you add up all the taxes in France, income tax, social charges, TVA, and a tax on everything you possess for people having a new worth over $75,000, including their home, taxes are over 60% for middle class working people.”
The wealth tax on fortunes hits above 750,000 Euros, which is to say about $1 million, not $75,000. Anyway, wealth taxes are the way to go. Eliminate the income tax, the sales tax and other taxes that burden the active economy which creates all the jobs. Eliminate capital gains and dividends taxes. Just tax absolute wealth, at a flat rate. That is definitely the fairest and least distorting tax of all.
But yes, if you add up taxes in France, it is about 60%. But remember what you are getting for that 60%! You are getting medical insurance, a pension, and a free college education, not to mention a clean and swift transport system and electrical energy self-sufficiency.
In America, the average middle class person spends about 36% of his income on taxes. But when you add in the cost of medical insurance and pension savings, and college education costs and savings, these total costs add up to about 67% of the American’s paycheck.
So yes, in France the taxes are higher, no doubt about it. BUT the overall person pays a lot less in the aggregate for the same bundle of services (government + health insurance + retirement security + college education) than Americans do.
Big insurance pools for necessary things (like medicine, pensions and education) should be paid for through a single-payer state system. The French way of doing it is more economically efficient for French families than the American way. To put it plainly, after the cost of government, medical insurance, education and pension savings, the French family has 45% of their income left. After paying for the same costs: government, medical insurance, education and pension savings, the American family has only 33% of its income left. Which means, to me, that the French way of doing it is more economically efficient, especially given that wages are lower in France, so it’s 55% of a significantly lower salary that provides services as good as what the Americans get for 67% of their much higher salaries. I think that, over time, American companies are buckling under the American model and are going to force French-style public pensions and health insurance on the American government. The American way of doing it is unsustainable.
France is through the worst of it economically. The French economy is growing steadily, and French unemployment is slowly but steadily shrinking. So, France will keep its model, because it works better that you seem to think. I predict, in fact, that America will be forced by economic reality (of spending far more per capita to do the same things) towards the French single-payer model.