This is indeed one of the great debates of this end of summer. With soaring energy prices, some companies have seen their profits break records – first and foremost, of course, the oil and gas groups. Should we, then, tax these superprofits? Unsurprisingly, employers oppose it, as Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the president of Medef, did not fail to point out. With 27 billion in additional revenue, it would actually be “the state” who would be the first of “superprofiters.”
The argument seems totally fallacious to me. Let’s start by recalling that France’s budget is structurally in deficit, and that the debt has widened by more than 400 billion euros over the past two years. We are still far from overabundance…
Above all, and more fundamentally, it must be remembered that the State is not a private actor. When a company generates additional profit, it uses part of it to remunerate its shareholders, in the form of dividends, which they can dispose of as they wish. When the state brings in additional revenue, it uses it to increase teachers’ salaries, recruit nurses, support precarious homes, or repay the debt that weighs on future generations.
We’ve been hearing this little music for years, according to which the state is a profiteer that binges on the backs of corporations. No, the state is not a bottomless pit where money would disappear: the revenue is always redistributed to the population – in one way or another, and with more or less efficiency, it is true. , but they are always redistributed.
In any case, there are serious arguments in support of this idea! Nicolas Goldberg, energy expert at Colombus Consulting, recalled that, despite the war in Ukraine, it does not cost more to extract gas. On the other hand, it pays a lot more. The TotalEnergie group, for example, doubled its net profit in the second quarter of 2022.
At some point, an ethical question arises: can we accept such a pension when, at the same time, the most precarious French people are suffering from inflation? Especially since, all the same, we are emerging from the Covid crisis, during which the State supported companies at arm’s length. If it is considered legitimate to deploy exceptional aid to deal with exceptional difficulties, it does not seem absurd to pay exceptional taxes in the case of exceptional profits. Otherwise, it’s called privatization of profits, nationalization of losses, and it’s the best way to drain public services.
This is the argument of Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, but also of the government. The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, declared Tuesday August 30, precisely in front of the Medef, that “Our policy is simple: less taxes, more work, more wealth for all French people. Taxing more in France means producing less in France.”
That’s a good slogan! The problem is that it is just that: a slogan. Imagine that an article was published this summer by the economists Charles Boissel and Adrien Matrey, in the very serious American Economic Review. He studies what happened in France when François Hollande decided to triple the taxation of dividends for certain companies. What do we notice? The companies concerned distributed less money to their shareholders, and increased their investments. The conclusion of the article is clear: contrary to what Bruno Le Maire says, taxing dividends more means producing more.
And that’s basically the whole problem. For the government of Emmanuel Macron, the reduction of taxes has become an intangible principle. However, taxation is not a taboo: it is a tool, which the government has no reason to deprive itself of – if not out of ideology. Perhaps we could start by thinking about a tax on companies that profit from the energy crisis…