Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fjslfj | Hacker News Reader

French entrepreneurs are upset because they can't get as rich in an exit as they would like, so they protest? And you want the rest of the country to support you in this? Okaaaaay.... This is the sort of greedy childishness that we could do without in the tech business world. If you're in it for hacking cool shit, you're not going to spend this much time thinking about your exit. This is similar to people protesting the tax rate on lottery winnings -- absurd.

Go back to work, stop whining.

View on HN

Greedy childiness? We sweat our asses off trying to build a business and overnight we're being told that in the rare case we do get an exit, it'll be taxed at 60% as opposed to 30%. How is that either greed or childiness? Do you even know what the live of a founder with little funding and no personal income can be like?

And of course we love what we do, but bills don't pay themselves. And maybe one day I want to have a family and a better income to support it, as opposed to not paying myself for over a year now (goodbye savings from 5 years of working before that), year during which I did pay my team btw.

We're not whining. We're fighting this.

(Trolling here but) perhaps president Hollande can take an example from another famous president and claim " If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet".

Or go to Belgium just next door where there is no capital gains tax on exits at all.

Ah, so there's the taboo against wanting to be rich babarock was referring to. As a francophile european, I am grateful for your volunteering to be poor so my vacations will be cheaper. Keep up the good work!

Not fixing the deficit is surly a superior way to "volunteering to be poor".

It was mainly in reference to the attitude (how DARE you want to make money?). Step number one in creating growth is to stop casting suspicion on the ambition and successful - and France is not alone in being bad at this, most of "old" Europe is.

But anyway, thinking you can fix the deficit by doubling your already high capital gains taxation while your neighbor Belgium, which whom you have open borders and share a language, have a 0% rate is ... naive, at best. Same naivety covers the 75% income tax rate, which is attempted applied to the single most mobile class of people ever to walk this earth.

Who do you think provides jobs and economic growth? Your government or new businesses?

On the other hand, who paid for the education of your employees ? Who pays when they go to a hospital ? Who built the roads they use to get to work ? Who is going to give them money when they get old ? Who pays the policemen who protect your office from robberies...

I see you. You think government paid for all those things. Let me correct your view: You and I pay for all those things (through government which takes it's own cut out of everything).

yes, and if you pay less taxes, then it won't be able to pay for it, and if a government can't pay education, then there's less employees competent enough for your start-up. Same goes for a lot of thing the government pays. And government is the only one who is (realistically) able to pay for it.

We're not talking about paying less taxes. We're talking about the more and more taxes to pay for a government that is -in essence- broke. Hollande basically promised everybody everything and is now facing reality. Like they say: "You can deny reality, but you can not deny the consequences of denying reality".

Let's face it, there's not an infinite number of unnecessary spending, at some point you have to be close to a balanced budget and even though I think taxing entrepreneurs too much is a bad idea, they aren't starving and I think asking for a little solidarity isn't too much to ask.

You probably don't want to pay for "those lazy public sector employees" (and if you do, forget this sentence) but it's just a front for selfishness.

"Asking for a little solidarity" is in my opinion not the point. You know, entrepreneurs are a resourceful bunch. Every society needs people that are willing to take risks. Hollande is acting like he's on an island. I can tell you right now his actions are causing reactions. Startups that won't happen in France/ Paris but in Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, London... All are just a few hours away.

By the way, you make it sound as if being selfish is a bad thing ;-)

Then what are they complaining about ? If you don't care about France, just leave

They are it's not something to rejoice about... "“Seen from abroad, France is the last country where an entrepreneur wants to go,” Marc Simoncini, the founder of French dating site Meetic. com, said in an interview on BFM TV last week.

“I don’t know of any British person who’s come to set up a business in France. But I know plenty of young French people who’ve gone to London to do that.”" http://business.financialpost.com/2012/05/14/french-entrepre...

We can all agree that France isn't entrepreneur friendly but it's easy to say "don't tax us" and it's a lot harder to find places where money can be saved.

Right now if you want to tax the high middle class and higher (that includes entrepreneurs who can leave France), they threaten to leave, I don't see how starting negotiations by making threats is a good thing.

I would suggest not looking at the people and raise their taxes, but instead look at government itself and see how they can spend less. (Not talking about cutting benefits but the size of government itself and everything regarding it's operations).

Funny, the US should be the worse place for startups then since the government doesn't pay for people to go to universities there.

They still pay until high school.

Notice many people working at tech startup in silicon valley are either A) Rich already and went to Ivy League or could afford a good university education, or 2) Foreigners who got their education elsewhere.

Well, before the student loan craze it was not difficult to find an affordable university in the US.

Certainly not Ivy League, but not bad.

E.g.: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2004-09-08-tui...

Today an Ivy League tuition year will set you back around 40k (possibly more) http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

When you get a chance, go find a copy of your national budget and find out how much of it goes towards education, health and infrastructure. Then stop using that argument.

http://voila-le-travail.data-projet.com/budget2012 in proportion, I think the budget is fine, more than 1/4th goes to education (if you include universities)

Wow, that's a great visualisation!

Total: 676,625 millions (hover on the top bar, I can tell what the 366 bln in the headline refers to?).

Schools: 62,330 mln = 9.21%

Higher ed+research: 25,439 mln = 3.76%

Transport: 4,307 mln = 0.64%

Health: 1,379 mln = 0.2%

For a grand total of 13.81%. I'm not sure how you get to 1/4 going to education?

There's an error with the 676,625 millions I think, the correct total is 366,000 millions

If you look at this one from 2011 : http://www.performance-publique.budget.gouv.fr/fileadmin/med...

you can see that 23.6% went to education in 2011

OK. Not being fluent in French, and not knowing the vocabulary used in France, I can't evaluate these and find other sources. But, for one thing, however, the pie chart doesn't seem to include debt payments. Also, a proper comparison would include the regions.

The 12.7% is debt payment, regions are in charge of secondary education and transportation mainly

I agree.

Please stop whining :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com