It won’t be this year. One more time. Despite a multitude of reports, reform proposals and parliamentary amendments, France will not immediately touch the inheritance tax. Or only in the margins. The projects that are still on the table were discarded on Friday, November 29, during the Senate’s examination of the draft budget for 2025. They have almost no chance of resurfacing within the framework of the mixed commission scheduled for December 16. Only a handful of amendments that survived Senate control reduced inheritance taxes when they relate to a farming operation, are used to purchase or renovate a primary residence, or benefit the children of a single-parent family.
“Every time you try to make real changes in this area, you abandonsays Claire Fournier, journalist and author of the essay. Rethink legacy (The Observatory, 2022). Remember Emmanuel Macron’s first statements against annuities and in favor of the inheritance tax, in 2016, before his first election. Once he came to power, he assessed the hostility of the French and nothing changed. »
The stage was renovated this year. Previously, several reports fueled the reflection, coming from the Court of Auditors, the NGO Oxfam and, on Wednesday, November 27, from the Left Hemisphere think tank, associated with the Jean Jaurès foundation. Everything seems quite convergent: there is room for a profound reform of the inheritance tax. In 1791, the French Revolution adopted the first law taxing inheritances, in the name of the ideals of equality and fraternity. But, more than two centuries later, “Inheritance tax does not play the role it should play in improving equality of opportunity”noted economists Olivier Blanchard and Jean Tirole, in their report titled “The great economic challenges”, which they presented to the Head of State in 2021.
“Exemption provisions”
Despite this tax, inequalities have indeed increased in recent decades. Between 1998 and 2021, the average wealth of the poorest 10% of French people fell by 54% in constant euros, according to INSEE. That of the best-endowed 10% increased by 94% during the same period. The poor thus became even poorer and the rich much richer, thanks to the double increase in real estate prices and the stock market, which consequently increased the value of their possessions.
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