>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.

No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.

They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.

You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.

Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.