France seizes the crown of the most heavily taxed country in Europe



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It is official France is the most taxed country of the EU.

According to the latest Eurostat report on the percentage of a country's GDP derived from tax revenues, France is at the top of the European ranking.

About 47.7% of the country's GDP comes from tax revenues in 2017.

This is enough to pbad Belgium where the tax-to-GDP ratio is 47.3%, Denmark (46.5%) and Sweden with 44.9%.

Ireland is at the bottom of the table, where tax revenues are only 23.5% of GDP. The ratio of taxes to GDP is 35.4% for the United Kingdom.

One of the reasons France dominated the table was because it had the highest ratio of social security contributions (social contributions) to GDP.

About 18.8% of France's GDP comes from social security contributions which, unlike the income tax, are automatically deducted from the income of salaried workers in France.

Germany came next, with a social contribution ratio of 16.7%.

Regarding the basic income tax, which will be deducted at source in France from next January, the percentage of GDP was 8.7%, which placed the country behind the United Kingdom. where the ratio of income tax was 9.2%.

The Eurostat report – the EU's statistical machine – sees France topping the rankings for the third year running, at a time when the country is at the center of a protracted anti-government protest inspired by the French public's anger over paying taxes.

Yet, the French have always tolerated and defended the fact of paying high taxes because it was the price to pay for public services, as well as for the welfare state that protects the poorest.

But the ongoing protests against the yellow jacket suggest that the French, or at least the lower middle clbades, are tired of paying such high taxes.

As part of his budget for two years, President Emmanuel Macron has tried to strengthen the spending power of workers by reducing social security contributions.

But with rising taxes on gasoline and the price of gasoline, workers who depend on their cars for a living might not have noticed that there was more money in their pockets.

Macron has yellow vest demonstrators to stick to his plan to raise taxes on gasoline and diesel in January.

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