PARIS
A couple of day ago, July 14, we celebrated our National Day of Glory: Bastille Day, that commemorates the day we shook off the shackles of an absolutist monarchy. Today, July 17, is a sad day as it is the first day in the year when French citizens can keep the result of their hard-earned income. Yes, from January 1 until July 16, every single penny a Frenchman makes goes straight to the government via income tax, VAT, payroll taxes and a myriad other levies French lawmakers show so much creativity for.
No other European or developed country has to wait so late in the year to be freed from the weight of such quasi-confiscatory tax policy. But then no other government inflicts such a punishing tax burden on its citizens the way the French government does. As the below map shows, on average the French government takes away 54.1 % of an employee's full salary (including the employer's share.) Austria is number 2 with 53.4%; followed by Germany. The UK only taxes a reasonable 35.2%, meaning that the UK Tax Freedom Day comes much earlier than for France: on May 9. Even Spaniards are better treated: They are freed of their government obligations almost a month and a half earlier than their French neighbors: on June 8. And this, despite having had to endure 5 years of a Socialist-led coalition government with the radical left.
Now, nothing intrinsically wrong with living in a Communist society. If that's what the French want, they're entitled to it. Except that something is clearly not right. Having the government tax you more and more in order to fund better quality public services is a perfectly legitimate choice. Except that the quality of public services in France has been heading south for the past decades:
-Healthcare is no longer what it used to be: Two decades ago, you didn't have to pay anything when you went to see your GP or presented a prescription at your local drugstore. Now, Social Security only pays a fraction of your healthcare and medicine, and the percentage is decreasing year after year. And that's if you're lucky to find a doctor: Seeing a specialist make require you to wait 2 or 3 months, some operations have longer wait lists.
-Education is going down the drain with an increasing number of French students leaving high school unable to write a French sentence correctly.
-Recently we went through weeks of mass protest because pensions are getting miserly and you have to work longer to get them.
-And as for law and order, just as the dreadful riots we saw two weeks ago are proof enough, that is not something that our high taxes are able to guarantee. Justice isn't faring any better: File a lawsuit in any court of law and you'll be lucky if you get a resolution within one year.
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| A book every French citizen should read |
I could go on and on, but you get my drift: We French citizens are paying more and more in taxes and getting less and less in public services. Shouldn't it be the other way round?
Why do we put with this? Are we masochists? Or mere fools?
On that Bastille Day I mentioned earlier in my post, King Louis XVI wrote in his diary: Nothing. The possibility that his family, having ruled the country for almost a millennium, could be out of a job just couldn't cross his mind. After all, for centuries French citizens would put up with all sorts of injustice and vexation and discrimination and high taxes (then paid only by the poor, the rich being exempted!) But then, one day, the people said "Enough is enough" and rose up.
Just as with Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. As a teenager vacationing in my mother's hometown in Romania, I would tell her, "Mom, I really don't think that people will put up with this for ever." And my mother would answer with a fatalistic sigh, "Well, look around. No country that embraced Communism has gotten rid of it." She was right...and wrong, since a few years later all Communist regimes tumbled one after the other, when people just said, "Enough is enough."
That is why I have every confidence that the Second French Revolution is on its way, and may arrive faster than we think. We will finally get rid of this discredited political class and its incompetent civil service partner in crime.
