French President Emmanuel Macron is wrong to laugh off President Donald Trump’s latest threat to slap a 100% tariff on French wine and champagne if Paris doesn’t nix its 3% “digital tax” on top tech companies — and not just because it angers Washington.
The French figure it’s a clever way to ding those annoying American tech bros — the French openly call it the “GAFAM tax” because it slams Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
That’s what it was designed to do, by targeting companies with sales of at least $860 million worldwide and $28 million in France — levels no European tech firm comes close to hitting.
Which is to say: The Europeans have no tech sector, which makes a joke of the France’s supposed goal of “tech sovereignty” (that is, independence of foreign firms), the excuse for passing GAFAM back in 2019.
Nor is this the only way European Union countries milk US tech firms: The EU collects more from fines on those US companies than from taxing all EU public tech firms combined.
Those fines are for not bending to the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which impose censorship mandates and other controls fundamentally antithetical to the tech culture.
All this — the crippling regulation, the predatory taxation — explains why European tech never gets off the ground, and indeed that most EU economies haven’t grown at all in the 21st century.
Macron and his allies sniff at Trump’s tariffs as banes on the global economy, but what’s actually strangling their economies are their own more-backward policies.
The joke’s on them.