France 24.
Two days after US President Barack Obama put tax reform at the heart of his re-election campaign, France’s Socialist nominee François Hollande pledged to raise levies on banks, big firms, and the rich to plough the country out of debt.
Hollande’s plans include scrapping a host of tax breaks implemented by recent conservative governments,which allow France’s biggest earners to pay proportionally less in taxes than middle-income earners.
The Socialist candidate also said he would push through a 15% tax increase on bank profits and go ahead with plans to separate banks’ retail activities from their more speculative market-based operations, a measure also in the pipeline in the US and Britain.