Comment by well_ackshually | Hacker News Reader

Comment by well_ackshually | Hacker News Reader

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well_ackshually

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.

> I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either

So you don't care about the size of your salary? Fair enough...

It's all the same to them, whether the social insurance contributions are shown on your payslip or not is just an accounting detail. It's still a tax on labour and no different that the share you are paying.

No, my employer's costs are not part of my salary. The proof of it being that employers have never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.

Please stop being so dense.

I must assume you are trolling at this point... Or lack a very basic understanding of the of finance and economics.

> never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.

Clearly fixable with a very simple law since some other countries somehow managed to achieve this.

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.

> Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.

There are countries in Europe that have done exactly that recently.

Besides Denmark which doesn't have employee contributions in the same way and is transparent about the full amount of taxes you are actually paying. Are you claiming that showing that on the payslip is somehow depressing wages in Denmark?

> They're employer _contributions_ to the system.

Nice. Look, I had a great idea for 0% worker taxes in France. You just change all the taxes accounting to make the numbers look like you take them from the employee instead of the worker, and puff, magical 0% taxes! It's great, isn't it?

> 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 ?

Man, I don't know you, I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life. But, I thought that all the taxes you paid are supposed to provide for your retirement. Are you actually telling me this is all a Ponzi scheme mandated by the State? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

> I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life.

Yep, that's probably why my parents are unable to retire before 65, because they'd otherwise be under the poverty line. Both of them retiring with rather high physical damage from their career.

Fucking hell, you keep reading headlines halfway, misunderstand them and then badly apply them broadly to a situation you don't understand

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