France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, has proposed scrapping two public holidays as part of radical measures aimed at reducing the country’s ballooning deficit, boosting its economy and preventing it being “crushed” by debt.
Outlining the 2026 budget on Tuesday, Bayrou suggested Easter Monday and 8 May, when France commemorates Victory Day, marking the end of the second world war, although he said he was open to other options.
The centrist prime minister said: “The entire nation has to work more so that the activity of the country as a whole increases, and so that France’s situation improves. Everyone will have to contribute to the effort.”
France is under pressure to bring its public deficit, running at 5.8% of GDP, under the 3% figure required by EU rules, and to rein in €3.3tn of public debt – on which the annual interest, of €60bn, could soon become its biggest budget outlay.
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.
I feel so sorry for the people being taxed 55% that are still billionaires.
the second-highest marginal tax rate in the EU at 55.4%.
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?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.
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.
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 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).
When someone says “billionaires,” you can go ahead and include in that figure all those whose net worth is between 8 and 12 digits
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.
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.
Yeah like after World War 2, when the government imposed The New Deal and 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 when the government imposed 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 imposed “relief” through gifted billions to the ruling class as 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.
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.
We did that in Denmark this year, cutting a holiday.
It turns out the whole thing was a calculator mistake, and also, the same faulty calculator was wrong about needing it in the first place.
Meanwhile, the rich and the corporations don’t have to make any effort. There comes a time when they’ll have to grab some bourgeois to set an example. The French have forgotten that the bourgeoisie, like dogs, must be trained, otherwise they’ll do only shit
I don’t know about you guys but when we have a public holiday im normally out doing something. Spending money. So won’t this just cancel out?
Essentially, cancelling public holidays will in short term add some slave labourto the company, which in turn maybe add more profits, more b2b economical activity, and if France has any decent corporate tax and not too many loopholes, some money will go into budget to be allocated to usual overspending that got you into this place, and none to repay debts.
Tldr: you’re being screwed over, go protest, or ask for raises when this actually occurs.
American here… this plan implies that corporations are well taxed right. Cause if people work on a holiday, thier pay doesn’t change I assume. That means only the increased output that leads to corporate income generates leading to improved tax revenue counts.
If the corporate tax rate is low like in the US, this would be like trying to fill the bathtub through a straw while the drain is open.No no no, you can’t tax corporations silly. That would punish them for creating jobs and wealth, they will leave the country and take back their jobs and then where would we be? Better continually lower corp taxes and Unleash the Magic™️ that will somehow cause budgets to balance themselves and jobs to spring up in abundance.
Is that how france does it too? I know that is the concept here in the states.
Almost everywhere these days sadly. If there are exceptions, I’m not aware of them. Tax codes are globally under fire because companies see them as an impediment to profitability, and not the foundation for how society functions and thus allows business to function.
Well, in the US the board of a public company has a legal fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. And shareholders look for short term gains. So basically, if the company tried to do what was right for the long term, the board would get sued, and lose. After the united healthcare CEO got shot and killed, United started denying less claims. It was surely a short-term measure designed to help the company long term. A major investment company that owned a lot of shares is suing them for that specific decision. This kind of thing has lead to companies being controlled by people who favor short term wins, like lower taxes now, worry about everything else later.
Yes because all the recent evidence definitely doesn’t suggest that productivity is increased with 4 day working weeks overall
Why? Because free time is good for people’s mental and physical health. You know who’s more productive than someone who doesn’t have time or energy to improve their health? Someone who does!
Truly baffling stuff
And God bless the French, they will burn Paris to the fucking ground for this. Meanwhile, in the U.S., congress just decimated what little public healthcare we have, and guys with Gadsden flag profile pics and handles like, “1776patriot,” actively cheered them on.
He’s not a fucking centrist…
Yeah, let’s not touch one cent of the 221 billion € each year given to large corporations, and instead stop celebrating the victory against Nazism.
the annual interest, of €60bn, could soon become its biggest budget outlay.
public financial support for the corporate sector currently coats €100bn
Not only not a centrist, he can’t even do math.
Biggest public spending by far: gifts to private companies, going completely uncheck for decades, no one know what any of the 2000+ schemes are and why this money is given and for what and nothing is expected in return. But if we are missing 17 billions on healthcare budget, we are supposed to get screwed and shut up.
