Multiple parties are jockeying for position in the aftermath of France’s seismic snap election. The leftist New Popular Front (NPF) insists its ideas should be implemented.
France’s left wing New Popular Front (NPF) - now the largest group in parliament - has called for a prime minister who will implement its ideas including a new wealth tax and petrol price controls.
The leftist alliance secured the most seats in the recent French elections but fell short of the 289 needed for a majority in the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament.
President Emmanuel Macron’s Together bloc came in second and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party finished third.
France’s parties are now jockeying for position and it’s unclear exactly how things will shake out, but the NPF has insisted it will implement its radical set of ideas.
Based
This is a bit of a misleading summary.
Melenchon speaks for his own party, France Unbowed (LFI), not the entire NFP alliance.
The NFP as a whole has not declared support for Melenchon’s position, although his party controls 71 (~41%) of NFP’s 180 seats in the National Assembly.
Macron has already indicated that he will not allow Melenchon to become Prime Minister, and the entire NFP will be aware that they must select a more moderate leader to represent them if they expect to gain enough support from the centre to operate as a minority government.
It’s not just Macron or Ensemble, even within the NFP some parties don’t want Melenchon from what I understand. At least the PS (Parti Socialiste, but they’re actually just social democrats) which has 59 seats and therefore the second most seats in the NFP doesn’t want him to be prime minister.
The kkk references an organization common to the American Midwest and Deep South known as the “Klu Klux Klan”, most notorious for its domestic terrorist activities aimed at wealthy and well-organized communities of color following the end of the American Civil War. They were also a powerful political caucus stretching across both major American parties for over a century. Often conceived of as a “secret society” with a certain practices bordering on the occult as part of initiation and promotion, the real influence of the organization tended to boil down to its control of state and local police agencies and prosecuting offices.
A cracker is a stale white salty piece of bread, often served with soup or stew.
Gotchya.
For a second there I thought they were using it to say they’d take all of someone’s money based on the color of their skin as well as associating all white people with the KKK.
Can we get a non Murdoch source on this?
This is not a tax on the rich, it’s a tax on the upper middle class.
Your instinct to search for a non-Murdoch source is correct, as they are trying to paint the entire NFP as holding the same positions as their most extreme member.
There is little to no chance of Melenchon becoming Prime Minister or having any ability to enact this tax.
However a marginal tax rate of 90% on income over €400k is well above the upper-middle class and would apply to only the wealthiest families, most of whom would still have other avenues to minimise the tax they actually pay.
400’000€ yearly income is not middle class. It is roughly the top 1%. Are you maybe mistaking property for income?
I would have preferred taxing on property instead of income, but as long as interests and profits and other benefits are part of income, it sounds reasonable to me.
The… upper middle class…? An income of 400,000 euros? that’s 10x the median income.
What tf is rich then?
People who make money by investing. In the USA, the top 1% earn their income through investments, usually the purchase and sale of stocks. These are not taxed the same as regular income because they made the argument that you can’t really tax unrealized gains on investments that are sold, and it takes a while for the gains to actually materialize. Also, they tend to store their money, their liquid assets, in countries with looser tax laws, called tax havens. Much of their net worths are tied up in investments. Businesses, homes, art, classic vehicles, precious metals futures, oil futures, boats, etc.
Assessing the value of all of that is a chore, and they also pay lobbyists to keep the IRS defanged so that they don’t have the resources needed to go after the 1%. And don’t get me started on how much more speculative the stock market has become. Investors buy stocks, not on the expected dividends they’ll receive as a share of the profits of the business, but on their ability to flip the stock and sell it at a higher price to another investor, who is only buying because they anticipate flipping the stock. It’s like if a whole neighborhood of single family homes gets bought up buy a few house flippers, who make renovations, then put the houses up for sale, and sell to new flippers, who are only buying so they can make further renovations, increasing the value of the property again to sell to yet another flipper, ad nauseam.
Petrol price controls is a terrible idea.
Why not subsidised (free) public transport, more cycle lanes more cycle parking, subsidised electric bikes, mandated EV charging.
Controlling Fossil Fuel prices can prevent other private entities from driving up inflation of commodities. It doesn’t have to be permanent, you could effect a set goal for 6 years, evaluate the results every 6 weeks, and tweak the pricing to prevent inflation/deflation cycles.
While you control the transport costs, you can now plan on how much energy it is consuming to do the logistics. Even setup renewables for the remote regions with medium to large capacity backups ( not just chemical batteries, but pumped storage and other practical solutions ).
You could increase the buffer between different urban zones, commercial, industrial, heavy commercial, dense residential, suburbian.
- Energy storage densities.
- Vehicular traffic densities.
- Public transport frequencies.
- Private traffic exemption zones.
- Cycling/Pedestrian infrastructure.
- Rent-controlled segmentation.
- Recreational facilities , maintenance and usage.
All of these things can be measured, calculated, even funded by simply controlling the Fossil-fuel prices.
Imagine 10 or 20 stadiums with Extra-Large battery backups, only on game-nights the full bank would see utilization, rest of the time, half or even quarter of the load can be saved up for fluctuations. In emergencies the stadium provides power, safety, shelter and communal support.
So many things can be planned around transportation and logistics. Fossil-fuel literally drives a lot of the traffic. Measure, calculate and control that and you have a reliable method to make sensible common sense decisions. Transparent for all citizens to see the data and the correlation. Accountable for every cent.
Lots of places in France are so remote and sparsely populated that public transport does not work there, at least not yet. It may or may not work once autonomous vehicles are fit for rural areas, but this may take a while.
Because motorists hate anything that would help them. Why would you not want a separate bike lane as a motorist? It reduces congestion and gets the cyclist you hate so much off the road at the same time! It’s a win win!
