France Warned Against Higher Taxes by EU

Cut spending, says Brussels

New measures to reduce France's budget deficit must come from public spending cuts, the EU's economic affairs commissioner said Sunday (25 August), warning that any new taxes would "destroy growth and handicap the creation of jobs."

In an interview with the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, Olli Rehn, commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said that tax levels in France had reached a "fateful point". "Budgetary discipline must come from a reduction in public spending and not from new taxes," he added.