The increase in the price of a packet of cigarettes is no longer enough to compensate for the drop in sales

The Ministry of Finance is doing its sums, and knows exactly how much it will lose in 2024. Some 400 million euros is the amount of the shortfall. So much money that will not fall into the public coffers while the government is already struggling to balance its budget. As the daily newspaper pointed out on Monday, July 29, The echoes : Social Security predicted that these taxes would bring in nearly 14 billion euros to the State this year, excluding VAT, which is added to all other taxes. The Ministry of Economy hoped that the sharp rise in the price of cigarettes last January would provide a godsend with ever more taxes to boot, but that was not the case at all.

The government expected a different result thanks to the high taxes on tobacco sold. The machine has always proven to be juicy in terms of tax revenues. These taxes, the public authorities call them prosaically “Consumption duties on tobacco products”but the recipe no longer works. One could say that 400 million euros of shortfall is small compared to the billions of deficits and debt, but small streams make big rivers and there is no reason for the trend to reverse.

In terms of taxation, the increase in tobacco prices is no longer enough to compensate for the drop in sales. According to the Customs, which keeps the accounts, between January and March 2024, tobacconists sold 100 million fewer packets of cigarettes than they did a year ago in the same period (650 million packets in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 750 million in the first three months of 2023). What may seem like a good signal in terms of public health is less and less so for the State coffers, which, let us remember, uses this tax to cover prevention (upstream) and care related to tobacco addiction (downstream).

Tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death and kills 75,000 of us each year in France.