Lhe French public finances are faced with a double mystery. On the one hand, the public deficit is slipping in the short term, even though the global economy is good and unemployment is at its lowest. On the other hand, public expenditure and revenue continue to grow, and yet the perception of a deterioration of public service and its results is increasing in health, education or the fight against poverty.
The government is reduced to hoping to resolve these paradoxes with the arrival of growth, like Estragon watching for Godot. This is to fail to see that the deterioration of public finances and the stagnation of the standard of living are two sides of the same coin: an extensive but inefficient public sector, which no longer seems to justify the extremely high taxation which weighs on the work and prevents the standard of living from rising through wages and private employment.
To remedy this, a Copernican revolution must take place in the conception of the role of the State budget: public finances must be put at the service of growth, rather than waiting for hypothetical growth to come to the aid of finances. public.
On the expenditure side, too many positions are a brake on activity, without however targeting the most vulnerable. Thus, unemployment insurance provides a disincentive for returning to work; generous but poorly controlled sick leave; or higher education that is not geared towards the best opportunities. Nothing is more symptomatic of this French preference than the growing weight of pensions (and their recent over-indexation), a massive transfer, each year, of nearly 350 billion euros from assets to inactive seniors.
Essential increase in wages
On the revenue side, a tax system that is particularly disincentive to activity essentially weighs on the bases most reactive to taxation. (work, and in particular part-time work of young people, women, and seniors on the fringes of employment; business investment; residential mobility). Conversely, it relies far too little on the least mobile bases (the value of land) or on externalities (carbon emissions).
Financing more efficient spending with revenues that are less destructive to prosperity is imperative. Four projects would make it possible to make French taxation “at the same time” fairer, less harmful to the economy and less subject to economic downturns and clientelistic errors.
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