In his recent book
The French Way
, Bruno Le Maire calls into question the financing of the French social model.
And the Minister of the Economy put a piece back into the machine this week, in an interview with Sud Ouest.
“To finance this model, we increased the levies on those who work.
And those who work can’t take it anymore
,” insists the minister.
These deductions, according to Bruno Le Maire, could create a gap
“between their gross and net salary”
of
“40 to 50%.”
What is it in fact?
By definition, the gross salary corresponds
to “the entire sums received by the employee before deduction of social security contributions payable by him, the general social contribution (CSG) and the contribution to the repayment of the social debt (CRDS) »
, notes INSEE.
By extension, the net salary is the remaining part after deduction of contributions and social security contributions.
“On average, these contributions reach 20% to 25%,”
says a Parisian accountant specializing in payroll management.
50% is impossible.
Even a business manager does not have such a gap between his gross and his net.”
Same story from another payroll manager:
“At the highest, and in certain very specific cases, it can be around 30%, but I have never seen a difference beyond that.”
“Slip of the tongue”
or abuse of language?
If on average each employee deducts 23% of their gross salary to obtain their net salary, how can Bruno Le Maire highlight such income gaps?
“That could be a slip of the tongue.
Perhaps he added the withholding tax, it’s a common error
,” the Parisian accountant tries to explain.
Since 2019, tax of course appears on the pay slip.
“When reading it, people often confuse net salary and after-tax salary
,” adds the payroll manager.
Between the gross salary and the transfer to the account, the withholding tax can be from 0% to 45% depending on the income bracket.
On the side of Bruno Le Maire's cabinet, we rather assure that the Minister of the Economy wanted to show the gap between the net salary and the
"super gross"
salary .
In accounting jargon, this
“super gross”
refers to the gross salary to which employer contributions are added.
The share of charges paid by the employer varies between 25% and 42% of gross salary.
Their amount increases in particular depending on the salary level, mainly because of the supplementary pension contribution which rises to 21.59% on the highest salary bracket (between 3,666 and 29,328 euros of monthly income).
Between the “super gross” salary and the net, the gap can therefore reach more than 40%, as supported by Bruno Le Maire.
“We must get away from this idea that the gap between gross and net is irreversible
,” insists the minister in his interview with the regional daily.
To try to increase the income of the French, Bruno Le Maire defends in his work the idea of a social VAT, or the reduction in employee contributions which would be compensated by an increase in VAT.
A measure already acclaimed by Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon before him.