"Don't think of an elephant". In his book, the linguist George Lakoff deciphers the final goal of this paradoxical injunction: to make one think of an elephant. Just as by dint of saying that he is not the president of the rich, Emmanuel Macron runs a strong risk of lead to the same effect, especially since he gives arguments every day.
Just last week. In the midst of discussion on the social security finance bill, the LREM group, via Olivia Grégoire, presented an amendment aimed at reducing the taxation of stock options and other free shares (AGA). Reciting her catechism, the deputy of Paris asserts: "The distribution of free shares is a process that is both advantageous for companies (which can thus attract talents who otherwise would not be within their financial means) and for employees, who find in it an interest in the future of their structure.". This small gift of 120 million euros to companies, and mainly to the largest (a figure that the opposition deputies finally obtained with a hard fight), was not on the program. Never mind: the rapporteur General LREM announces the color: "favorable opinion", ditto from Minister Agnes Buzyn. Packed, it's weighed.
Apart from the fact that the government, despite being very fussy about spending, finds it appropriate to dispense with 120 million, this small amendment is not insignificant. On the form first. In accordance with parliamentary practice, the examination of amendments is done first in committee before their discussion in plenary session, as was the case on Thursday 26 October. Amendment 646 signed by all the members of the LREM group, departs from it, and opportunely appeared without going through the commission box. Anger even in the LR ranks. The deputy of Loiret, Jean-Pierre Door, calls for a suspension of the session and the urgent convocation of the Social Affairs Commission. What he will get.
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Macronist revenge
But it is on the merits that the New Left MP, Valérie Rabaud, lingered, supported by Adrien Quatennens, of the Insoumis. The MP for Tarn et Garonne knows this subject well. It was she who obtained last year the increase to 30% of this tax, which the Macron law had reduced in 2015 to 20%. So here is Emmanuel Macron avenged. While in his presidential campaign, he had to observe from afar the unraveling of one of the flagship devices of his own law. Here it is restored. Not at any price. As Valérie Rabaud points out, "you have already made, with the payroll tax on the fourth tranche, a check for 120 million euros for the executives of large companies who earn more than 150 euros a year, and you are starting again today with a check for 000 million euros! Where are we going to stop?".
And in fact, these two measures add up in that they are aimed at the same people: high salaries, in particular those in finance, who also happen to be those who receive the most stock options and AGA. According to a document from Bercy, among companies with more than 500 employees, 363 of them had declared half of the base for this tax in 2015. More than a third for the almost 100 largest with more than 2000 employees. This package of shares weighing nearly 6 billion euros.
120 million + 120 million +...
Emmanuel Macron therefore assumes his economic bet. With this new measure, the president increases by another 120 million euros his already heavy investment of several billion via the end of the ISF and the establishment of the flat tax (or single flat-rate levy) on movable income (shares, etc. +: massively reduce the tax burden on the richest in the hope of finding all this money in investment. For the time being, he has won his political bet, as in Jean-Luc Mélenchon recently agreed: his majority holds, whether on his work orders or on his budget, while the opposition is struggling to find its bearings.
There remains the economic bet. Even if officially, it is not the run-off theory that governs his economic choices, all the options taken end up drawing something that strongly resembles it. But there is a catch. As Vincent Eblé, the PS president of the Senate Finance Committee, recently revealed, Bercy puts the number of jobs created by the billions 'given back' to the richest at 50.000 in the long term. A straw. This is not really a surprise: the runoff theory is sorely lacking in academic studies to validate it.. On the contrary, they are plethora to show how these very particular economic actors that are the rich excel in optimizing their advantages and lowering their taxes.
Transformation of salaries into dividends
This is the case with the one just produced by Gabriel Zucman, which made it a relationship in Le Monde entitled The flat tax is a time bomb for public finances. For this professor of economics at the Californian University of Berkeley, the thing is understood: the single fixed levy of 30% on capital income will cost much more than the 1,5 billion euros budgeted.
The reasoning is based by analogy on what happened in particular in the United States. By creating a gap between the taxation of income from capital and that of work (in this case in France almost 16% less for the former), the actors who have the information and have the technical capacity, otherwise says the elites of the wage earners like the executives, will artificially transform wages into dividends. This is called positive arbitrage in finance. Loss of tax revenue in the long term, according to Gabriel Zucman? More than 10 billion per year, 20 billion in a dark scenario. This dynamic reasoning also applies to levies on stock options: if it only costs 120 million today, it will mechanically cost more in the future...
As if he wanted to prove the economist right even faster, Emmanuel Macron, with his reduction in the tax on stock options and free shares, puts 10 bullets in the machine to artificially transform salaries into distribution of shares and dividends.
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source: Marianne.net
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