[lma21]

Charges patronales and charges sociales are not really "taxes" given your understanding of taxation.

Charges patronales and charges sociales are well explained in every payslip, i.e. where that money goes and how the employee/employer benefit from them.

Also, every person's net income tax is also explained and you can see where it goes.

At the end of the day, when a French person loses their job (even if they're a non-essential worker in any industry), they go home not worrying about a single damn thing... it's good to have such security, no?

[jbn]

You are right that Charges patronales and charges sociales are not really "taxes" , in fact some politicians (LFI and EELV come to mind) insist on calling it "socialized portion of the employee salary", which is a better description.

However doing this would cause a mind shift where the employees would realize how large a fraction of their compensation package is in fact retained by the government either in the form of taxes or in the form of charges. A positive outcome of this is that it would force this realization, since so many people think healthcare/education/pension are free...

Another aspect to this is that different corporations have been allowed to charge these Charges patronales and charges sociales at different rates (for instance nurses pay 14% for retirement, whereas the rest of the population pays 28%...). Worse an entire half of the workforce, namely all the civil servants, have no Charges patronales and charges sociales at all (in other words, the French state is a special employer that gets away with not paying for these, paying for the actual pensions out of its general budget rather than its stowed-away-for-later funds.... and when the French state goes bankrupt, it just needs to raise more taxes on the private sector employees to make payroll on its pensions!).

[kelnos]

I agree that it's great for the French worker (way better than how US workers are treated), but you have to also see how it's a disincentive for a French entrepreneur to create a new company, no?

[ldng]

It has been that way quite a few decades. Yet, people are still creating companies. So maybe it is harder than somewhere else but it is far from being the only problem you'll meet when creating a company.

[ldng]

The term "Charges" is not even legally correct. It is a way to give it a negative bias on purpose.

[jbn]

Yes. "Charges" translates to "load" or "burden" in English. Using that word makes it sound like it is only the employer that bears this burden, whereas it is very much >50% of the employee compensation package that is socialized (or mutualized, which may be a better word) towards health/unemployment/age insurance.