All taxpayers now benefit from a 10% reduction on their income, capped at around 4,000 euros. That is to say, you declare 100 but you are only taxed on 90. The origin of this reduction is to grant an advantage to the taxpayer to take into account their professional expenses. As a result, some of our minds say that retirees benefit from this reduction even though they have no professional expenses. We could recover 4.5 billion per year. It’s a little money. The Medef proposal.
Okay, is this a good measure? First, it’s a tax increase. So it’s stupid, in principle. We are at the highest point in history, at the highest point in Europe, at the highest point in the world, stop. Second thing: Patrick Martin who contributes to tax creativity, we don’t need him on this subject. He’s much more helpful in what he usually does, defending businesses. I add that,In retirement, you already have a very significant redistribution, with the replacement rate. For a retiree with a high standard of living, his pension will only be 30%. For a small salary, 80%. And we already have something powerful, without counting the CSA for pensions above 2,000 euros. In fact, we always treat the problem of the welfare state this way: we take more and more to finance expenses that we cannot control. The central subject is to increase the base, to work more.
Does this measure have a chance of passing? No, not as such: if we listen to our leaders, they say that there will be no tax on the middle class. More prosaically, retirees, wealthy in particular, are Macron’s electoral clientele. What is possible is that we lower the ceiling of this reduction: currently at 4,000 euros, it could be halved. It is still entirely characteristic of the French debate. We have a gigantic demographic problem, we are trying to tackle it with a mediocre reform, which only addresses it half way.. A poorly prepared, poorly negotiated, poorly voted reform. Suddenly, everyone is bawling. And we return to the two favorite expedients of the French: new taxes and the siphoning of reserves. Olivier Faure, the boss of the PS, wants the reform to be suspended for a few years by taking billions from the pension reserve fund, set up thirty years ago. It brings to mind Reagan’s famous phrase, who mocked bureaucrats and said: “Everything that moves is taxed; what is still moving, we regulate it, and everything that is no longer moving, we subsidize it”.
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