[bilekas]

Its harder to take back policies like this than it is to object and get them stopped initially.

Also people have a habit of 'forgetting' about it later. Until stories of how it is misused are found. And then it's another attack vector we need to be conscious of.

[ElFitz]

And that’s how France still has VAT & revenue taxes.

Revenue tax? Have to pay for that expensive WWI war effort, you understand? For all the good it did.

Same with the VAT. Have to rebuild after WWII, you understand.

We also have an "Exceptional and Temporary Contribution" (CET), recently renamed to "Technical Equilibrium Contribution" (still CET. Smart one, that one).

A funny one, for a change?

When the Germans invaded in WWII, they changed France's timezone to theirs. After the war, we still called it "the German time". There were talks of going back for a few years…

Guess who still has noon at 2pm in the summer, decades later?

Change, no matter how ridiculously small or sensical, even when nobody benefits from the status quo (ie the damn timezone) is horrendously difficult.

Thus one should always assume that once it’s here, whatever "it" is, it’s here to stay.

[candiodari]

There is still one constant: how the state system cares for victims of child abuse is still the same as in WW2.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...

You would think money would go into the "backend": caring for kids where the state is responsible for everything BEFORE more money goes into the frontend: finding more kids to throw into the hellhole that is child services.

Without the "backend" being in order and working well, raising well-educated, stable kids, the frontend is completely immoral. "Saving" kids from abuse, only to throw them into a slightly different kind of abuse ... if any person did that (e.g. a guy marrying a woman (or I guess vice-versa) with that resulting in that person abusing their new spouse's kids) would be considered a despicable crime. Somehow child services, who do the exact same thing (and they use violence to do it) is not a despicable crime.

Somehow just because the state does it, makes such things all a-okay.

But frankly this is merely the hole in the justification, all this should merely tell you one thing: any government that doesn't work hard to fix the child services backend does not have children's interests at heart when making these sorts of laws (and mostly they're making budget cuts in the backend, of course). Because fundamentally these laws throw children into the child services system. THAT is the real effect these efforts have on the actual children behind this. THAT is what is meant by "saving kids".

And if that system is full of abuse, how is that any better than what paedophiles do? It's not.

Which means the state is not attempting to help abused or disadvantaged children. In fact, they're doing the opposite.

[wutbrodo]

> We also have an "Exceptional and Temporary Contribution" (CET), recently renamed to "Technical Equilibrium Contribution" (still CET. Smart one, that one).

This is amazing

[ElFitz]

Oh, there’s a lot more where that came from.

Just an example. During a heatwave some summer over a decade ago, many elderly people died.

So what did the government do? They instituted a "day of solidarity", of course!

What does it mean? If you are salaried, then you get to work an extra day, during a holiday of your company’s choosing, and not be paid. The day’s salary will go to a public fund dedicated to helping promote the autonomy of elderly people. And your employer gets an extra day of employees supposedly producing value out of it.

Many people instead take the day, either on their paid leave or their Work Time Reduction days (RTT).

That’s on top of all the other social "contributions" (sounds better than taxes), of course.

Payslips used to be quite funny to decipher[1][2]. They’ve simplified those a bit since then; mostly by regrouping items[3].

[1]: http://cdn-s-www.ledauphine.com/images/F9FED7FA-778E-40CA-8F...

[2]: https://cap.img.pmdstatic.net/scale/http.3A.2F.2Fprd2-bone-i...

[3]: http://s-www.ledauphine.com/images/39A7BC0B-D6E2-456D-800D-5...