“Fraternité” apparently works better with cash incentives
19 Oct 2006 
in mid-afternoon 
Matt Winckler
France buys a baby boom by offering massive incentives to women who have children. By doing so, they’ve reached the point that their birth rate is the envy of European nations everywhere: 1.94 children per woman. Of course, in exchange for these wonderful incentives (including $960/month gov’t stipend for a year for your first child; double that for your second), Frenchies making 50,000 Euros a year (about $62,000) are paying an income tax of nearly 50%. And that doesn’t count VAT of up to 20% applied to all goods and services (including food) sold in France. The real tragic thing the story points out, however, is that “three-fourths of all French mothers with at least two children are employed.”
With a 50% and more tax rate, the young mothers probably HAVE to work just to exist. It’s tough making ends meet here in the US on one income…but 50%? ouch. Course it may be all the free day care and other incentives that are driving that tax rate.
Hi, I know you don’t know me… I went to your wedding.. Mystie knows me, she wore my wedding dress. Anyways, I just wanted to add that they also get 6-8 weeks off consecutively paid a year, and they are requried by law to work no more than roughly 30-35 hours a week. I can’t remember which. So it’s gotta be awesome being a man over there, but it sounds like being a stay at home mom is even more difficult than over here. My question is what do they do with all that tax money? I’ve never been to France, but I’m pretty sure the streets aren’t paved with gold.
It probably pays for universal health care. That’s a pretty expensive thing to pay for.
Well, yes. That and the fact that France is a welfare state. Got to support all your winos and vagrants somehow.
And then of course you have to factor in the cost of replacing public facilities destroyed every so often by the Frenchman’s default mechanism for communicating messages to the government, which is defined as “burn a car and march on Paris”. Plus all the riot police and so forth. Gets expensive!