There is an urgent need to react. For the Court of Auditors, the government should not wait to program "in the long term" the effort to deleverage public finances, while the public debt will soar this year under the effect of the crisis. While the government is counting on a rebound in growth as early as next year to reduce the debt - and excludes, for example, any tax hike - the Court considers a "recovery effort", particularly in public spending, essential, in its annual report on the situation and prospects of public finances.
>> INTERVIEW - Pierre Moscovici: "I believe that a debt must always be repaid"
"The spontaneous rebalancing of public accounts will, in all likelihood, only be very partial: without recovery action, the deficit risks being durably very high (...). The debt trajectory would then not be under control" , warn the wise men of rue Cambon. The government expects a historic recession of -11% this year, with public debt swelling to nearly 121% of gross domestic product (GDP), before a rebound in the economy next year. But for the Court, "we must not expect everything" from growth, because even the most optimistic scenario of a rapid recovery will not allow France to return to its pre-crisis debt level by 2030. And this one, bordering on 100% of the GDP was already considered worrying before the crisis by the Court, which drives the point home in this report.
The effort "must not be too brutal not to break the recovery" but ...
"France has not tackled this crisis with restored public finances", she notes, pointing to recurrent "budget fatigue" from the various governments which have little reduced public spending and the deficit. But the Court does not defend an immediate tightening of the screw: the effort "must not be too brutal not to break the recovery but it must be continued with consistency to obtain tangible results", she estimates. It thus calls on the government to define a debt reduction trajectory in the future public finance programming law "at the latest" next spring. This would also allow France to show Brussels its goodwill, with a view to lifting the suspension of European budgetary rules.
>> EDITO - Public expenditure: when the state does as it pleases
This trajectory should in particular provide for an "in-depth examination" of public expenditure, in order to favor investment expenditure, in particular in the ecological transition and health, in parallel with an "increased effort to control other expenditure", judges the Court. . In addition, "if further reductions in levies were to be envisaged (...) they should be accompanied by increases in other levies or the elimination of niches or find their counterpart in an even greater effort to control spending", she warns.