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.
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.
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.
Read the article looking for his reasoning. Nada. Apparently he got a calculator out and thought, “We could be 0.54% more productive!”
For only two days, there is almost no productivity lost. People simply work a little harder to make up that time. There’s also less work because no one else was working, but still, c’mon.
OR, and hear me out on this one, you could TAX THE RICH.
Does this cheese eating surrender monkey want the French to riot? because this is how you get the French to riot.
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.
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.
Sounds like royalty to me, we’ll get the cure out of the storage and sharpened again
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
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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.
I feel so sorry for the people being taxed 55% that are still billionaires.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
But they should reduce pensions because it only benefits older people who could be used for more research, defense and infrastructure.
If income increases, but you don’t manage it well, the problem won’t be solved.
Yeah, so imagine. Wild idea here, we tax the rich. To increase the income of the government. Who can invest in the working and middle class, who can then have disposable income to stimulate the economy. Just a crazy theory I have there that has been shown to work every time it’s been implemented. Crazy right? It’s been 50 fucking years, it doesn’t trickle down Reagan.
why not just lift the age limit of pensions to 90, right?
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 dollar is the global reserve currency, so yes, by default we focus in terms of US dollars. It is also American globalisation which created these people. There’s this cool new thing thing called History we in Europe study, it allows for current events to be contextualised. It’s a pretty hip thing with the kids, you can learn more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History.
Edit: There should not ever be an
average American billionaire.
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.
When someone says “billionaires,” you can go ahead and include in that figure all those whose net worth is between 8 and 12 digits
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.
Or, we could stop making excuses for not taxing the rich and… Tax the rich.
Being from the US, I don’t know the french tax system, what % are the different classes paying?
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
MoArE dAyS pAyDe MoArE mOnEyE
Yeah, that’ll go down well with the populace I’ll bet. Cue rioting and fires.
Knowing what I know of French history, I would never be a politician in France.
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.
They’ll have his head for this
Easter Monday
France may not be very religious any more, but it looks like they do still have a lot of religious holidays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_France
Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, Assumption Day, All Saint’s Day, Christmas Day, Saint Stephen’s Day.
looks like they do still have a lot of religious holidays
Wow. Working people get holidays. So?
Good Friday and Stephens are only for a very small portion of metropolitan France (former occupied territories that still have a few oddities like these)
Really? I thought most of Europe had the long easter weekend (good friday, easter monday) and Christmas day and boxing day (st stephens) as holidays?
Well, you can count France as not part of most of Europe in that regard, only the areas that were German between 1871 and 1918 have them as public holidays
Thanks, TIL:
St Stephen’s day is an official public holiday in Alsace-Moselle, Austria, the Balearic Islands, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Catalonia, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Madeira, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, Switzerland and Newfoundland. The date is also a public holiday in those countries that celebrate Boxing Day on the day in addition to or instead of Saint Stephen’s Day, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
I know someone from France with 36 vacation days 😅 36 !!!
Jealiousy brought you to the point of laughing about others having it better than you, and accepting your horrible state as the norm.
Guess what? They have paid sick leave as well.
I bet you lament about billionaires and big corporations all day, not realising that they make the rules where you live. Why would you laugh at a country that values their citizens at least a bit instead of doing everything for the profit of the richest?
I would not jump into too many conclusions. My friend with 36 days of vacation said she’d prefer somewhat higher wage in France and would be happy with a few less days. To conclude I am jealous would mean you know me a bit. And you don’t. :)
Your friend wants higher wages. Stop.
That’s is just 10 days (two weeks) more than the mandatory minimum for new eyployees, it’s above average, but it’s what you get in most EU countries with some 10~20 years of work & a few kids.
(The orange part is just the starting minimum.)
What a shitty info graphics. Says Europe and then doesn’t even touch anything past the Iron Curtain. What is this, 1989?
Hungary has 11 public holidays. And the number of vacation days are mandated by age, starting with 20 days at age twenty and then gaining one additional day every two years, so at forty-five and above for a total of 30. Since this is not based on tenure, it doesn’t matter whom you work for. Plus two more days for the first two kids, and an additional three for the third for a total of seven.
This is on top of 15 covered sick days, which you can also take for taking care of sick dependents under the age of 12.
Yes, true, I looked for a better one but gave up :( (mid meeting at the office).
But overall productivity isn’t actually an issue, wealth concentration is, saying more work-hours are needed is such a shitty approach (well, there are much shittier ones too, def!).
Thanks for sharing
Less than 2 month, not a lot. I have 31 by default and it’s the lower end of the norm
Yes that’s nice! I also have 31
27, plus bank holidays, and I get days back if my on call falls on a bank holiday. I’m not going to complain, but that’s indoctrination.
