Really the only way as an employee is to have a family because income tax depends on household size. And let's remember that there is a de facto second income tax (CSG/RDS) on top of the income tax.

But this is a small part of the issue with tax. Regarding employment there are the taxes paid by employers, as you rightly point out, which make the cost of labour quite high in France, but there are also all those other taxes on about everything.

> Are you including social contributions of employer and employee in your 20% tax rate?

Only income taxes. The employer taxes are mainly pension / health insurance.

Compare for example with Denmark where the social contributions are close to 0 and the income tax up to 50%.

The total of the employment taxes paid in Denmark is still lower than the total in France.

Denmark seems to be a particular case compared to other OECD countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_in_Europe#/media/Fil...

Yes, I chose this extreme example on purpose to show that evaluating only the income tax is not meaningful.