At his press conference on Tuesday 13 November, François Hollande declared that, “Returning to a balanced budget essentially means looking to spending cuts rather than tax increases. Are we better off with 57 per cent of GDP of public spending, whereas it was 52 per cent five years ago?” He is right. This is common sense coming from a socialist president who set out with a policy of tax hikes, practically without touching public expenditure that is the highest among OECD countries. France spends € 150 bn more than Germany per year. Does that mean that the Germans are less well off? The average public spending in Europe is some 48 per cent of GDP.
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The Taxpayers’ Alliance has launched a petition on its website (freezebusinessrates.org) to enable taxpayers to appeal to their members of Parliament on business rates.
Corporate taxation in the United Kingdom rose by 4.6 per cent in 2011, by 5.5 per cent in 2012. Yet the coalition government seems set to implement a further 2.6 per cent hike in April 2013.
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In his book The Anti-American Obsession, philosopher Jean-François Revel exposed French fantasies and clichés on the United States and towards its President. It is customary in France to poke fun at US Presidents, treating them like morons who have gotten elected head of state in some miraculous fashion: Nixon was thus a dangerous reactionary, Carter simply a “peanut salesman”, Reagan “an excited cowboy”, George W. Bush “a real idiot”. Two Presidents have largely escaped French insults: Clinton and Obama. Both are Democrats, the first being elected after “the disaster of the Reagan era”, the second after the “terrible years of Bush Jr”.
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Our colleagues at the TPA have campaigned successfully against union subsidies. This means that the number of civil servants working for the unions at the taxpayers’ expense will now be…
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Swedbank has calculated what Swedes already knew: taxes are by far the largest budget item for any household. An individual earning SEK 25,000 per month pays SEK 17,500 in taxes (of which SEK 6,100 to the municipality, SEK 4,300 in pension dues, SEK 3,380 to the health care authority and SEK 3,360 to the central government).
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As tax revenues are flooding into the Treasury, the German taxpayers’ association (BdSt) has asked the federal government to axe the “stealth” tax increases and to cut spending further. Current estimates show that tax revenues will be substantially higher than previously thought: a record 600 billion euros in 2012 and 700 billion euros in 2017.
The BdSt considers that some 27 billion euros could be saved in the federal budget.
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IREF has examined the provisions of the French government’s 2013 budget proposal, and concludes that these are confiscatory and arbitrary. Henceforth taxpayers will be subject to taxation on revenues of which they do not dispose, and forced to pay taxes that are above the corresponding incomes. Under these circumstances, IREF will endeavour to facilitate an appeal on this kind of taxation through a petition to the Constitutional Council.
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By Nicolas Lecaussin
Can you imagine that unemployment has been “priority number one” for French politicians over the past 35 years! Left, right and center have all claimed that their first objective was to reduce unemployment, in particular among young people. Yet they have failed every time. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy regularly repeated that “the French social model has protected us from the crisis”.
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Jean-Philippe Delsol
Tax lawyer, deputy director of IREF
The government’s goal of reducing the budgetary deficit to 3 per cent of GDP is commendable, even though such a deficit will inevitably increase the French public debt as growth will be low or even close to zero. However, the tools applied are both unjust and inefficient.
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Despite being bombed by information, it seems we have forgotten the roots of the debt crisis. Instead we play a martingale game, where the only precaution after losing a round is to double the bet for the next one. The solution is not called EFSM, EFSF, ESM, SMP, OMT or banking union. These are just different names for a single problem: diluted responsibility. Unless we find a way to make local politicians pay locally for local promises, the euro project will be always in trouble.
