10 May 2014

France has 192 "petites taxes" - many of which are pointless. Scrap them I say!

In case my case for scrapping the current tax system and replacing it with a simple, universal and painless FTT was not sufficiently convincing, take a look a soon to be published report on a set of 192 "petites  taxes" in France, produced for the French government by the IGF "Inspection Générale des Finances".

The contents of the report were described in an article in "Le Figaro" on the 7th of March. Together, the 192 taxes raise €5322 billion - which may sound quite good. But it turns out that in many cases the cost of collecting the taxes exceeds the amount of money they raise.
Here's a figure from the Figaro showing which sectors are currently affected by this mountain of taxes. The French Budget Ministry is considering scrapping 90-100 of them.  I say scrap them all! It's just needless bureaucracy. Replace them all with an automatic financial transaction tax on all electronic transactions.

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