Jean-Pierre Robin: "When Taxes Replace Social Contributions to Finance the Welfare State"

CHRONIC - The idea of social VAT is nothing revolutionary in itself. It makes it pretty good that taxes are increasingly replacing the contributions supposed to finance the welfare state.

While France is desperately seeking to restore its competitiveness and balance its social accounts, and in the context of persistent inflation, the growing precarisation of the middle and popular classes, Emmanuel Macron and the MEDEF come out of the closets of an old idea with the misleading name: "social" VAT, which is in reality anti-social but also anti-economic. An idea not only ineffective but also harmful because it diverts public debate …

On 13 May 2025, during the show Les Défis de la France broadcast on TF1, Emmanuel Macron slipped a sentence that did not go unnoticed: "The financing of the social model rests far too much on work." It was no longer necessary for the spectre of social VAT to emerge in the public debate. Without ever explicitly naming it, the President revived this idea, which was thirty years old, of reducing wage social contributions — which today weigh on payr…