Modulating taxes on fuels, Jospin had already tried … without success



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POLITICS – The term "floating tax" has not been pronounced by the President of the Republic. In his speech on the ecological transition supposed to answer to the yellow vests, Emmanuel Macron merely mentioned the possibility of adapting the level of taxes on fuels to the evolution of oil prices. This device is part of the measures debated during the three months of consultation at the local level that the Head of State announced in parallel. Today, the amount of these taxes is set for one year and it will increase again on January 1st.

But already, the return of the expression "floating TICPE" is in everyone's mind. This mechanism, similar to that announced by Macron, has already been implemented in France to respond to a crisis in the road transport sector. From October 2000 to July 2002, Lionel Jospin had made this tax on petroleum products (known at the time TIPP) flexible depending on the price of black gold. But the badessment that the Court of Auditors had made a few years later had turned out to be very negative.

At the time, it was a question of offsetting by a decrease in the TIPP the increase in VAT revenues linked to the rise in oil prices. If the latter moved more than 10% from one quarter to another, the evolution of the TIPP in the opposite direction was triggered. "The taxes went down once, then nobody dared to raise them, the motorists would not have understood," recalls Le Figaro Jean-Louis Schilansky, former boss of the French Union of Petroleum Industries.

This is why in the end, the Court of Auditors had estimated a shortfall of about 2.7 billion euros for the accounts of the state. And for the motorist? "The decline was at most about 2.19 cents per liter," noted public finance experts. For comparison, fuel prices have fallen in France by more than three cents in the last 15 days, according to official data from the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition. That's 50% more …

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