After the MEDEF and the powerful metallurgy federation (UIMM), France Industrie is in turn asking for a sizeable tax rebate on these production taxes, in particular. And the employers even managed to agree on an amount: 35 billion euros of reduction over five years.
Emmanuel Macron has already lowered these production taxes by 20 billion euros in all in two years. A decision taken at the end of confinement, to give a breath of fiscal oxygen to the industry. Business leaders are now calling for the effort to be extended beyond 2022. Because these taxes with somewhat barbaric acronyms (CVAE, C3S, CFE) weigh on the industry, according to business leaders. company that denounces them regularly.
These taxes, which bring in some 75 billion euros per year to the State and local authorities, are not calculated on the basis of profits, but of turnover or land. Industrialists thus say that they pay taxes even before having earned any money. This reduces their competitiveness and encourages them, according to them, to relocate activities outside France.
Moreover, the Economic Analysis Council, a think tank attached to Matignon, does not say anything else. In a note published in July 2020, he estimates that these taxes are “the most harmful because of the distortions they cause throughout the production chain”. Higher than elsewhere in Europe, underlines the CAE, they weaken companies because they increase, in fact, manufacturing costs.
On the right of the political spectrum, many candidates for the presidential election are proposing a reduction in production taxes: from Valérie Pécresse to Éric Zemmour via Marine Le Pen. For his part, Emmanuel Macron has not yet spoken, but his Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, has started to sow small pebbles. A month ago, during his greetings to the press, he was already wondering aloud about the relevance of maintaining some of these taxes.