VC are companies, not people, so what they earn is counted as benefits, not revenue. Moreover, in their P&L, they can subtract the L from their P, and average their money streams over several years.
There are legitimate issues with this law:
* it creates a lot of gratuitous bureaucracy and complexities, where you need to apply to some byzantine exceptions to the exception to the common law to keep a decent share of the wealth you produced; this kind of unproductive BS drives genuine entrepreneurs crazy and disincentivize them, probably more than the tax bracket in which they fall;
* it creates a very legitimate sense of insecurity among small businesses;
* it sends an overall message that France is not a startup-friendly environment, and that if you can help it, you should rather incorporate in another European country.
This last message is, unfortunately, very true: both the corporate and political French elites come from the same few schools, mostly ENA; so politicians have many executive friends in the private sector, but they all only worked in huge companies. They wish that the next Google would appear in France, but they can't realize that Google-like wealth creation never comes from dinosaurs on the scale of AT&T or GM (or Orange, or Peugeot). Moreover, this cluelessness is shared by conservatives and liberals equally.
There is no conservative/liberals differenciation in France. All French senior politicians and civil servants have exactly the same life trajectory, are educated in the same school, ENA, and share the same values. There is a lot of opportunist movement from a party to another, showing that party ideology has zero weight.
PS: you may bring Nicolas Sarkozy as a counter-example. He, indeed, did not go to ENA because he failed to graduate from IEP Paris, which is a prerequisite.
There are legitimate issues with this law:
* it creates a lot of gratuitous bureaucracy and complexities, where you need to apply to some byzantine exceptions to the exception to the common law to keep a decent share of the wealth you produced; this kind of unproductive BS drives genuine entrepreneurs crazy and disincentivize them, probably more than the tax bracket in which they fall;
* it creates a very legitimate sense of insecurity among small businesses;
* it sends an overall message that France is not a startup-friendly environment, and that if you can help it, you should rather incorporate in another European country.
This last message is, unfortunately, very true: both the corporate and political French elites come from the same few schools, mostly ENA; so politicians have many executive friends in the private sector, but they all only worked in huge companies. They wish that the next Google would appear in France, but they can't realize that Google-like wealth creation never comes from dinosaurs on the scale of AT&T or GM (or Orange, or Peugeot). Moreover, this cluelessness is shared by conservatives and liberals equally.