So they tried to soak the rich with their 75% tax rate and it was a disaster. Half the population of France pays $0 in income tax and the rich pay half thier income. So what is the problem and why hasnt socialism solved it by now?
They tried and then quickly learned that tax rates that go above 50% tend to hurt GDP and push the capital out.
This is exactly why I tell you to place facts before your ideology. The U.S. has economic issues. Why hasn't capitalism solved it by now? This is not a socialism issue and I suspect that you keep merging that word into communism:
- Despite the government playing a significant role in the economy, France has a widely liberalized economy. <---capitalism.
- France has the world's 6th largest economy in the world.
- With 28 of the 500 biggest companies of the world in 2018, France ranks 5th in the Fortune Global 500, behind the USA, China, Japan and Germany.
- France is the world's sixth largest agricultural producer and EU's leading agricultural power
- The French are among the least indebted populations in the developed world.
- There are 1.617 million millionaire households in France.
As for their problems? There are plenty of bad decisions, consequences, and repercussions involved:
- Let's get this one out of the way now: France is full of French people who like to protest about everything at the drop of a hat. They also like sitting around on their asses. Moving on...
- According to the economist Paul Krugman, the French have a lower workforce participation rate and "when they work, they work fewer hours." Along the way to building their nation during the Cold War, they made "different choices about retirement and leisure" than other countries in Europe and the U.S.
- In 1999, Keynesian economists sought out different solutions to the unemployment issue in France, and their theories led to the introduction of the 35-hour workweek law. But this led to the reality that less hours was insufficient to earn a living. This stressed their social programs well before the Great Recession threatened to completely break them.
- By 2012, it became apparent that France now had a "floating generation" that formed part of the 14 million unemployed young Europeans. Anne Sonnet, a senior economist studying unemployment claimed that nearly two million young people in France had given up looking for employment at that time, while French labour minister Michel Sapin said that 82% of people hired were only on temporary contracts. Sapin further explained that the challenge at that time was to create a more flexible system, in which greater trust existed between unions and companies, and "partial unemployment" was accommodated during difficult periods. The so-called floating generation was attributed to an allegedly dysfunctional system: "an elitist educational tradition that does not integrate graduates into the work force, a rigid labour market that is hard to enter for newcomers, and a tax system that makes it expensive for companies to hire full-time employees and both difficult and expensive to lay them off."
- Everyday, about 80,000 French citizens are commuting to work in neighboring Luxembourg, making it the biggest cross-border workforce group in the whole of the European Union. They are attracted by much higher wages for the different job groups than in their own country and the lack of skilled labor in the booming Luxembourgian economy.
* Along the way, companies were getting fatter because labor was increasingly less in participation and in 35-hour work week, and there has been no real incentive to expand business and create jobs. Economic disparity has become an issue. In the meantime, and in accordance to the current protests, the rich have managed to create many loop holes for themselves. And with France boasting 1.617 million millionaire households, this means even more stress on the social programs because they are escaping their responsibilities. This is why the current protests show the entire spectrum in the streets.