Beef & Taxes

French Premier Joseph Laniel's first try at national economizing was a cut in the government's huge pension payments. Result: a chain explosion of crippling strikes that threw him into retreat. Last week Laniel tried a couple of other, less risky approaches--a fiat lowering prices and a crackdown on France's multitude of tax evaders.

The Premier's fiscal experts ordered butchers to lower meat prices by 10%, and they quickly complied. Then came similar reductions for coffee, rice, flour, margarine and soap; others were scheduled for shoes, textiles, kitchenware, furniture, bicycles. To celebrate la baisse (the lowering), shopkeepers in central Paris hung a banner reading "Rue de la Baisse" across the Rue Montorgueil, and merchants and manufacturers with high inventories cheered. But plain people rubbed their chins and doubted that it would last any longer than other baisses decreed by some of Laniel's predecessors.

To get to the tax dodgers, teams of government inspectors fanned out over the country to check up on owners of luxury yachts, big villas and costly cars. The move flushed some big game right away, e.g., one man who owned three cars, employed three servants and declared no income was soaked for $42,000 in taxes and penalties. In the first roundup, delinquencies of $86 million were uncovered. But again, skepticism reigned. Frenchmen shrugged and guessed that evaders who knew how to win political protection would not be caught; in any case, the tax system as well as tax enforcement needed remodeling from the ground up.

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