Tribune. Emmanuel Macron proposes to implement, if he is re-elected, a common tax on the income tax of cohabiting couples, in order to reduce the supposed tax inequality existing between married or PACS couples and cohabiting couples.
This is the very example of a bad tax idea: under the guise of fighting against inequality affecting couples according to their mode of conjugality, this reform would lead to transferring to cohabiting couples all the perverse effects of tax conjugation.
In France, the concept of tax household, associated with the couple, is an essential notion of the tax theory which imposed itself with the institution of the general and progressive income tax. This common contribution must be equitably established between the taxpayers and take into account their particular wealth, that is to say their ability to pay.
A certain idea of family
It is therefore a question of defining a unit of taxation: either the tax hits the individual separately without consideration of his legal, social or economic framework, or the tax hits a social group, the family more precisely, according to of its contributory capacity.
However, French income tax considers the household as an economic and social unit within which resources are pooled. Thus, the contributory capacity of the household, and not that of its members, is captured by globalizing their income. To calculate household income tax, the incomes of the two married or PACS spouses are combined, then this sum is divided by the two shares allocated to the couple – this is the “marital quotient”.
In the presence of children, the family quotient also counts the number of children attached to the household to apply a dividing coefficient. We thus obtain an income per share of quotient to which the progressive scale of income tax is applied; then the amount of tax calculated for a quotient share is multiplied by the number of household shares to obtain the overall tax.
The conjugal quotient corresponds to a certain idea of the family: marriage first, then, later, the civil pact of solidarity (pacs), are considered as the foundation of the family and only married or PACS couples can form a tax household.
On the other hand, cohabiting couples do not constitute a “household” with regard to income tax and each remains taxed individually. The reason for this is that the notion of tax household reflects family solidarity based on the pooling of household income, regardless of the choice of matrimonial regime of the married or PACS couple.
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