"After 8 years of tax choices that have favored the richest...": the Power to Live Pact enters the budget debate

Budgetary imperatives are a convenient excuse, recalled the members of the Pacte du pouvoir de vivre (Power to Live Pact) on Tuesday, May 6, a collective founded in 2019 by 65 civil society organizations including Oxfam , the Housing Foundation, the CFDT, ATD Quart-Monde and the Climate Action Network (RAC ). "Debates on deficit reduction or defense funding too often serve as a pretext for a significant challenge to our collective pillars ," they emphasized in their press release.

Without denying the importance of public debt , they warn against the leaders' obsession with this issue, and their blindness to the deterioration of the social, environmental and even democratic situation in French society. "The need to control public debt cannot and must not be achieved at the expense of the most vulnerable, nor at the cost of abandoning ecological transformation," assures Marylise Léon, general secretary of the CFDT .

In its accounting and technical aspects, the fight against deficits, especially since Emmanuel Macron came to power, is a tool for unraveling public services. It has also served to undermine the rights of the most vulnerable (reform of unemployment insurance, RSA, APL , etc.) and, more recently, to abandon all ambitions to limit and adapt to global warming.

"One of the crux of the problem is the temptation to respond urgently to long-term problems," says Claire Thoury, President of the Mouvement associatif, a member of the collective. This policy is validated by a prevailing discourse on "too much tax," which makes reducing spending a necessity. However, "after eight years of tax choices that have favored the richest, it is perhaps time for that to be reversed," emphasizes Oxfam President Cécile Duflot .

Another choice of society is possible, believe the member associations of the Pact, which propose a series of measures that can be applied immediately. The first is the return of tax justice , "a founding element of the social pact," in a country where "we are witnessing a worsening of wealth inequalities and a return to a society of heirs like in the 19th century," insists Cécile Duflot.

This includes, among other things, the return of the ISF (wealth tax), better taxation of inheritances, financial transactions, and share sales. More targeted actions could also be implemented to improve daily life, such as the perpetuation of the law on rent control, the tripling of energy vouchers, the overhaul of the student grant system to broaden coverage, or the end of sanctions against RSA beneficiaries.

It would still be necessary for politicians, starting with the Prime Minister and his Minister of the Economy, who are in charge, to take up these concrete proposals coming from actors on the ground. So far in any case, and despite François Bayrou's calls for a major budgetary debate , neither of them has responded to the letters that the Pact sent them.