French Prime Minister Manuel Valls promised to press ahead with reforms and cut taxes, brushing aside calls from some in his own Socialist party to water down a corporate tax credits scheme. Days ahead of an annual end-of-summer party meeting, Valls wrote in an opinion piece for business daily Les Echos that cutting France's tax burden was the government's third highest priority after reviving growth and jobs.
"Our country has reached record levels in the matter and it is not healthy," he added. Valls said the government would work on reforms in the coming months covering the digital sector and giving companies and their workers more freedom to take decisions with less state interference.
Valls' pro-business stances have often not gone down well with left-wingers in the Socialist party, who have called for 40 billion euros ($46 billion) in corporate tax breaks to be scaled back. "The size of the support for companies will not be put in question," Valls said. "Companies need this visibility to invest and hire in confidence." Valls said that the 2016 budget being drafted and for publication in a month would also offer middle tax cuts to middle class households, as promised this month by President Francois Hollande.
Even though France's tax burden was already one of the highest among developed countries when he was elected in 2012, Hollande focused his deficit-cutting efforts in the first two years in office on raising taxes. Faced with a growing backlash, however, his government has since trimmed taxes for some 9 million of the poorest households.
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