Even before it was made public, some elected members of the majority were already apprehending the political consequences. The study by the Institute of Public Policy (IPP), whose publication coincides – not deliberately – with the fourteenth day of mobilization against the pension reform, is likely to reopen the subject never completely closed in the majority of the taxation of the capital and the taxation of large fortunes in France. “We need a political response to this study,” already worried in April the Renaissance deputy Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet (Paris), after having consulted extracts from the study put online in 2022.
The question of the taxation of high incomes and wealth has come up at regular intervals in the public debate since the abolition of the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF) in 2018, and the creation of the “flat tax” – then nicknamed “gift tax” (gift tax) by La France insoumise – which caps the taxation of financial income at 30%, including social security contributions. Tirelessly, the executive reiterates its opposition to any questioning of these emblematic reforms of the first five-year term, to the point of transforming any desire to increase taxes “in obscene language”summarized the essayist Alain Minc on France Inter Monday, June 5.
With always the same arguments: raising taxes would be taking the risk of damaging France’s attractiveness, which has been so hard to regain since 2017. According to the government, tax cuts are good for the country’s economy, willingly presented as a tax hell, since revenue has risen in recent years, particularly that of corporation tax, the rate of which has been reduced from 33% to 25%. Emmanuel Macron’s ambition is to encourage the French to invest their woolen stockings in the economy rather than in stone, for example by becoming shareholders of French groups which are now mainly held by foreign funds.
Financing the ecological transition
But recent work by the economist Jean Pisani-Ferry, who proposes, among other things, the creation of a “Green ISF” taken from the financial assets of the wealthiest 10% to bring in 5 billion euros per year, which would finance part of the energy transition, came to put a coin back in the machine. The question of the financing of this pharaonic project remains in effect, even if the executive is betting on the country’s ability to create additional wealth.
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