When he mentioned the idea of a “Green ISF” to finance investments in the ecological transition, the economist Jean-Pisani Ferry had provoked an outcry among the majority as well as among a number of economists. “Is tax a solution? No ! »immediately reacted the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire.
The idea nevertheless gained ground. A parliamentary report on heritage taxation, written by the leader of the MoDem deputies, Jean-Paul Mattei, and by the communist deputy of Cher, Nicolas Sansu, that The world was able to consult and which must be presented to the Finance Committee, to the National Assembly, Tuesday September 26, takes up the proposal.
While the draft budget for 2024 must be presented to the Council of Ministers on Wednesday September 27, the report challenges the government to bring the creation of such a levy to the European level. “To finance the necessary investments in the climate transition”the two elected officials recommend “the establishment at European level of exceptional and explicitly temporary levies on the assets of the richest taxpayers, the amount of which would be calibrated ex ante according to the anticipated cost for public finances”.
A proposal among the thirty avenues mentioned in this 227-page document to define “a tax system that guarantees fairness”, writes Jean-Paul Mattei. The elected official from the Pyrénées-Atlantiques – a land of the left where he has worked as a notary for thirty years, examining the assets of the rich and the less wealthy – swears, however, that he does not have the ambition of a “big tax evening”.
A tense budgetary context
The report appears at a time when issues of climate transition and public finances are in the spotlight. After detailing its ecological planning, Monday September 25, through the voice of Emmanuel Macron, the executive is preparing to present a 2024 budget under tension, caught between the need to replenish the state coffers by making economies, its own doctrine hostile to tax increases increasingly difficult to maintain, and the impossibility of closing the tap of household aid while the prices of fuel and food remain high.
Jean-Paul Mattei is not at his first attempt: it was he who, in the fall of 2022, managed to have an amendment adopted, against the advice of the government, taxing “superdividends” paid by the large groups that carry out “superprofits” thanks to the war in Ukraine. The measure was then withdrawn by the executive from the text adopted via article 49.3 of the Constitution. The MP, however, has never stopped plowing his furrow, campaigning after the pension reform for an increase in the “flat tax” on capital, emblem of Emmanuel Macron’s supply-side policy – a proposal taken from elsewhere in his report.
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