LThe anger expressed by our farmers in the face of the planned increase in taxes on diesel reveals a suffering widely shared by the population: must it always be the same people who pay? Should we increase a tax on electricity by 10%, but never tax the financial markets which regularly break new records?
No one disputes the need to find new resources: when Joe Biden puts 400 billion on the table to attract all green industry to the United States, we cannot remain without reacting. We must also repay Covid aid and find new means to win the climate battle: invest in public transport, finance agricultural aid, finally implement a major multi-year thermal renovation plan for all our buildings and supply the Aid Fund for Southern countries, created at COP28.
While the construction sector is announcing up to 150,000 job cuts this year in France, it would be dramatic if we accepted these layoffs. We remember that in 2007, the Grenelle de l’environnement organized by Jean-Louis Borloo resulted in a strong consensus leading to the desire ” to rehabilitate over the period 2010-2017 the homes of 300,000 modest owner-occupiers in situations of severe energy poverty”.
A fair, quick and efficient response
Unfortunately, seventeen years later, only 13,000 efficient renovations are carried out each year… Millions of our fellow citizens are in a situation of great energy poverty, France’s trade balance shows a colossal deficit because of our gas purchases and oil, and climatologists are paralyzed by the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere which is increasing today three times faster than in the 1960s or 1970s.
To avoid these layoffs and to respond to the climate emergency, we must immediately find new means, while responding at the same time to the demand for tax justice that emanates from all our territories.
A fair, rapid and effective response is the creation of a European tax on financial transactions. This is a request from the entire European Parliament which has voted on three reports on this subject in three years. The small tax (0.1%) proposed since 2011 by the European Commission would bring in up to 57 billion euros each year.
As economist Gunther Capelle-Blancard points out, the financial transactions tax (TTF) has all the advantages that make a good tax: “ It is not very distortive, its tax revenues are potentially high and collection costs are minimal; it also has a redistributive effect ».
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