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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but it says the tax only applies to this year and the next. It seems like there is an easy workaround - don't take your salary until afterwards, and/or pay yourself in advance now. It's just lip service, really, to keep the public happy.

The massively wealthy can afford to wait a couple years for tax laws to revert. And they don't mind waiting - the general public, unaware of reality, believes that the rich are paying more than their fair share of taxes.

Meanwhile, new tax incentives and loopholes are created all the time, in every country. You won't know about them, but you can be damn sure that the expensive CPAs do.

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The problem is there is no guarantee that it will be only for these two years. It can easily be extended.

It will very interesting to see how much extra tax it will bring in and how it effects the decision making of the big French companies in regards to salary incentives.

There is a pretty good guarantee - if it lasts longer than two years (which seems unlikely), general corporate profit will pile up until the wealthy stakeholders and top employees get extremely frustrated. Then they can collectively apply pressure to politicians to eventually create a loophole that lets them take their money out tax-free.

> It can easily be extended.

Indeed. Just like the Netherlands where 2013 saw the introduction of the "one time crisis tax" (eenmalige crisisheffing) which constitutes a 16% tax on wages, including bonus, over EUR 150K.

Now, for 2014, the "one time crisis tax" regulation has been prolonged. One time, promise! ("Eenmalige crisisheffing eenmalig verlengd")

>>It seems like there is an easy workaround - don't take your salary until afterwards, and/or pay yourself in advance now.

Or, get your salary reduced to just under the insane tax limit. Take the difference in some other way(Stocks, Real estate, Gold, vacation funded by the company etc etc).

Except the difference that should be paid to you won't be paid in a technical definition of a salary. It can be paid as a reward, bonus or some new incentive system.

Works like a charm.

This new tax is paid by the company, and capped to 5% of the companies earnings. It's already a loophole. Now a company can just funnel earnings straight to salary and have tax be capped at 5%...

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