A few days before the presentation by the government of its draft budget for 2023, France has no “room for maneuver” to lower taxes without compensation, warned Monday the first president of the Court of Auditors Pierre Moscovici.
“I think that we are not far from a threshold, a level where the consent to tax is in doubt”, affirmed before the Association of economic and financial journalists (Ajef) the former minister des Finances, who had theorized the “fiscal fed up” of the French when he was at Bercy.
In this context, with the rise in interest rates on the country’s debt, “we have no room for maneuver for dry tax cuts”, insisted Pierre Moscovici. “Fiscal stability is desirable”.
The government has already announced that it intends to include in the draft 2023 budget the abolition of the Contribution on the added value of companies (CVAE), a production tax which generates 7 to 8 billion in tax revenue annually.
During the presidential campaign, the candidate Emmanuel Macron had also mentioned a reduction in inheritance tax, the timetable for which is not yet known.
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“If we want to lower taxes, I’m not against it,” argued Pierre Moscovici on Monday. But “we must, in due proportion, either increase others or limit public spending”, he immediately added.
“If there are tax cuts, they must be compensated” because “if we don’t compensate for them, it’s more deficit, therefore more debt, these are deferred taxes”, detailed the boss of the Court of Auditors.