Florence Autret

@MichaelaWiegel @jnbarrot Entschuldigen Sie dann mein deutsch. Die Frage war: was meinen Sie? Dass sie es nicht dürfte, solche Fragen zu stellen ? Oder dass es seltsam ist, sie zu stellen?

@FlorenceAutret @jnbarrot Ich fürchte: lost in translation

Während 🇫🇷AM @jnbarrot russische Militärhilfe für #Iran anprangert, darf 🇷🇺 Lawrow im franz. TV widersprechen. Propagandaitv, das in der Behauptung gipfelt, 🇷🇺 verteidige das Völkerrecht. Kritische Nachfragen gab es nicht.

@izakaminska You are so right ! But it's not a tax rebate, but a tax credit. So if the household owns less income tax than 50% of its spending, the state pays off the balance (and largely in anticipation in january based on the previous year's spending) Cost : 7 billion per year

*** French budgetary factoid of the year***. 👇 🧹🧽🧼I've always been puzzled by why French cleaning and household management services are soooo expensive compared to the UK. Cleaners regularly charge as much as 30-35 euro per hour. 🧹🧽🧼 Yesterday, I finally figured out why. And the reason is frankly amazing. Like stumbling across a national secret nobody in France wants revealed more broadly. [For example, I can't find any English-language articles about it. Perhaps some exist in obscure holiday let trade press, but nothing major that I can easily find. Do pass on if you have seen anything]. 👉Turns out the French government offers households something called “crédit d’impôt pour l’emploi d’un salarié à domicile”. This is a tax rebate policy that allows households to recover no less than 50% !! of the cost of legally declared domestic and personal services carried out in their home. This includes, cleaning, ironing, gardening, childcare and assistance for elderly or disabled people. The policy was introduced in 2007 under Sarkozy in a bid to encourage formal declaration of work and to limit the size of the shadow economy. It also aimed to create low-skilled jobs, being framed as a social policy for the common good. In practice, this means if I, as an idiot foreigner who is not tax-resident in France, have to hire a nanny or a cleaner while on holiday in France, I have to pay about 35 euros for services, while tax-residents get to pay effectively half the price (bringing the rate closer to the UK norm for such services). But it also means that French cleaners get to benefit from 35 euro per hour rates, while the government subsidises the entire industry for households up to half of that price. That means the French government is basically subsidising cleaning and household upkeep services for the country. Of course, in reality, it's middle and upper-class households (who can afford domestic help) that benefit disproportionately from the policy. Moreover, I don't think many foreigners appreciate that this policy represents several billion euros a year in foregone tax revenue, making it one of the largest “tax expenditures” in the French system. I'd also argue the policy actively encourages low-skilled immigration into the country, while disincentivizing French kids from upping their skills, since why bother if a low-skilled worker can receive the same rate as a much more highly skilled artisan or other professional? We're talking about a salary of about €64,000-€72,800 per year. Similar rates would apply to self-employed electricians. In fact, most journalists don't make that sort of money! Also, I assume even some French people are caught out by information asymmetry. When they do not know about the credit, they effectively pay the full price for services that others obtain at half cost, or they forgo help altogether.

@WSJ on dirait le docteur Skreta dans la Valse aux adieux

Telegram founder Pavel Durov says he will cover IVF costs for women under 37 who want to use his donated sperm, and has promised his offspring a share of his fortune. 🔗: on.wsj.com/4pR6h0z

When the world’s largest tobacco company needed help lifting international restrictions on its products, it enlisted an unlikely ally: the EU, a leader in tobacco control. politico.eu/article/eu-tra…

Je rebondis tard sur l'excellente enquête de @euobs sur les pressions dans les coulisses d'Euroclear concernant l'utilisation des actifs russes gelés. L'enquête doit être lue en bloc. Mais le mot qui l'accompagne dans la newsletter de EUObserver résume tout: 1/

quel sport terrible! toutes sont magnifiques, mais Vonn est phénoménale

@Francois_Ruffin +1 le petit livre de P. Weil "De la laïcité en France" est un petit bijou, à lire et relire sans modération

Ce 9 décembre, ce sera les 120 ans de la loi de 1905 sur la laïcité. C'est notre trésor national. C'est notre repère, notre boussole. « Quand je vois la religion, disait Aristide Briand, je vois toujours deux choses : je vois le croyant dont la foi doit être protégé et je vois l’institution qui peut venir s’opposer à la République ». Alors, nous avons invité à l'Assemblée l'historien Patrick Weil, qui raconte sa naissance, la "guerre" que lui a menée l'Eglise, comment elle s'est fait respecter avec des procès à la clé, et comment aujourd'hui elle est à moitié ignorée. Un entretien pour se guider, avec le droit, dans les débats qui enflamment les médias.

" Vu sur les réseaux sociaux : « Ça se libyien ? » " A lire (comme toujours) lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/artic…

EU sanctions (inc. frozen assets) would have given leverage to Europeans as long as they would be diplomatically active/involved And it seems they were not (the extract is correct)

s'ils ne se réunissent pas maintenant, quand?

@NicholasVinocur @michaeldweiss and it was quite predictable

@NicholasVinocur if the extract below is correct, frozen assets will be de facto seized/preempeted by the US in the sense that it will be invested partly in "US led effort to rebuild" and partly in a "US-Russian investment vehicule" that is to say *not* 2 "buy European" via @michaeldweiss:

Why would the peace deal torpedo the Russian assets plan? I've heard this and don't get it. Will Kyiv suddenly have 170 billion euros to run their state if the bombs stop in December? The country is still in dire straits and nothing in Trump's plan mentions giving them money

@NicholasVinocur @michaeldweiss *preempted

il coupe l'herbe sous le pied de ses adversaires de l'AfD, se foutant royalement du régime sous lequel vivront ses voisins non-allemands c déjà grace au RN que Merz combat l'AfD mais Villepin le sait certainement 2/.

C'est intéressant ce q'il dit "il faudrait rappeler à Monsieur Merz qu'alors l'AfD aurait un boulevard" la manière dont le PPE, càd la CDU, piétine la démocratie européenne (n'en déplaise à Weber) en s'alliant à sa droite repose sur le calcul paradoxal qu'en agissant ainsi 1/

Pour lire l'original : abonnez vous! florenceautret.substack.com

Entièrement d'accord, @NPolony Comme je l'écrivais en septembre dernier dans cette analyse : florenceautret.substack.com/p/von-der-leye…

*fought

This is peak EU : Undoing what you fight for (and have voted for) 19 month earlier, while presenting it as a major victory Either you were wrong the first time or this one, but you messed up at some point

In between, quite coherently, the EP (and EC) renounced to simply name what they do by calling (nearly) all legislative pieces they put forward "omnibus" (the one voted this morning amends the CSDDD) which is like making yourself called simply "oneself" instead of your true name