France is Taxing

The Macron administration utterly failed in its cynical effort to raise its taxes on the French working class and poor with its “climate” tax on transportation fuels, so now it’s going to go after American tech companies with carefully targeted taxes.  And that administration is desperate to get going, and it’s going to do it unilaterally.

In early December, Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said France would give the EU until March to come up with a deal on taxing US internet giants. But ten days later he announced the tax would be introduced on January 1.

Wait, what?

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

And here’s the game, as confessed by Le Maire.

The digital giants are the ones who have the money.

So he intends to rip off uniquely tax our American companies for the heinous crime of outcompeting his precious French companies and then of being better tax managers than his precious French government.

Our companies need to think very carefully about the value they get from doing business in France compared with the French government’s imposition of wholly artificial costs for the privilege of doing business there.

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