The Taxe Professionnelle

"The French government will announce today the partial scrapping of the taxe professionnelle , a local business tax levied on fixed investment that has become a heavy burden," reports the Financial Times. Some of the revenue that had been generated by the tax will be made up by "a carbon tax on road fuel and energy use," the FT says. The idea that new carbon taxes should be accompanied by reductions in other taxes on, say, income or payroll has some political attractiveness, enough that it has support from both Al Gore and Arthur Laffer.