He will “never” do it. Gabriel Attal assured Wednesday that the government would not increase taxes on “working French people” or “the fruit of their savings”, during the first session of parliamentary questions intended exclusively for the Prime Minister in the National Assembly.
Recalling the creation of a working group of parliamentarians from the presidential camp to reflect on the taxation of annuities, the head of government affirmed that it was not a question of aiming, "as I can read here and there, the Livret A or the savings of the French”. This mission, announced Tuesday by Gabriel Attal, must make proposals between now and June to reduce the deficit, while the opportunity to increase taxes divides the presidential camp.
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These proposals will be made "in the same logic" as the "contribution on the infra-marginal income of energy companies and oil companies" or the taxation of "undue profits", which the majority has "assumed" to put in place on "income large medical biology laboratories which during the Covid crisis made 7 billion (euros) in turnover thanks to Covid tests paid for by Social Security,” underlined Gabriel Attal.
“Structuring and intelligent” economies
“The real difference between us and the oppositions in this chamber is that we will never attack the French who work, the fruit of their savings, the French who have worked all their lives, that is the real difference between you and us,” he insisted.
The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire also repeated Tuesday in an article published in Les Échos that the government would not increase taxes, believing that “it would be contrary to our national interest”. Bruno Le Maire thus refuses the use of any “exceptional tax, surcharge, temporary tax or yield tax”, explicitly targeting the tax on superprofits defended by part of the opposition and the majority, on which Prime Minister Gabriel Attal had declared “not to have dogma”.
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The Prime Minister also reiterated on Tuesday that the government still planned to bring the deficit below 3% of GDP in 2027, despite its unprecedented slippage in 2023 to 5.5%, which could lead to a possible downgrade of the debt rating of the country. The government must give next week “the trajectory which will allow us to reach 3% in 2027” and that “at the end of June, like every year, we will say how we get there, with the revenues, and therefore the conclusions of this mission , but also with spending, and in particular structuring and intelligent economies,” he said.