The PSOE has shown this Tuesday in the Congress of Deputies its rejection of a non-law proposal from its government partner, United We Can, which urged the Executive to launch a tax reform to raise taxes on large electricity companies and large rents. The Socialists have argued that vote against the initiative of the confederal group, which has had the support of some of the Government’s usual allies -such as Compromís-, in the need to “respect the times” of the committee of experts to which the The Ministry of Finance commissioned a report to restructure the tax system, a reform promised by the department headed by María Jesús Montero.
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“We trust to go hand in hand” with United We Can in matters of taxation, the PSOE spokesman, Héctor Gómez, assured in the morning at a press conference, trying to downplay the new gap evidenced between the allies of the Executive. His party, he added, does not want to get ahead of “this work that the Ministry of Finance is already carrying out.”
The socialist deputy Montse Mínguez later assured, during the plenary debate, that the PSOE and United We Can are joined by “many things”, among which the Council of Ministers has cited. “What does not unite us is the political opportunism of this proposal”, she has emphasized, also recalling the need to wait for the report of the Treasury experts. She has also told United We Can that “the enemy is not sitting on the blue bench”, but in the PP.
The confederal group proposed, among other measures, to replace the wealth tax with a new tax on large fortunes that cannot be discounted by the autonomous communities “to avoid the existence of internal tax havens such as the case of Madrid” or an increase in the type tax on electricity companies “whose turnover exceeds 10,000 million euros”.
Other points of the initiative contemplated the reduction of VAT on feminine hygiene products, hairdressing salons and veterinary products at the super-reduced rate, reorganizing tax benefits, bringing the rate of the tax base for personal income tax savings closer to the rate of the general tax base or create new brackets for income above 120,000 euros.
Echenique recalls the drop in corporate tax
The entire proposal contemplated “progressiveness” as a central element, a principle that, as United We Can recall, is “included in article 31 of the Spanish Constitution”, since “it ensures that the greater the economic capacity, the greater the percentage of income or wealth to contribute to the rest of society”. The reform, points out the confederal group “is essential to fairly redistribute the wealth generated, thus reducing social inequalities that also hamper economic growth.”
During the plenary session this Tuesday, the spokesman for United We Can in Congress, Pablo Echenique, defended his initiative in that since the financial crisis “the taxes that have risen the most” have been those of the working classes while “corporate tax has fallen by 40%”, despite the fact that the companies “have significantly more profits” than they did in 2007.
The Ministry of Finance plans to undertake a major tax reform in Spain this year, a point agreed with Brussels in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. And as a starting point for this reform, the Government, as the PSOE maintained on Tuesday, is awaiting the report of the committee of experts that was created a year ago to address the reform of the Spanish tax system.
The conclusions of this group of academics are expected, precisely, for this month of February, since the deadline given to them expires on the 28th. Asset taxation, Corporate Tax or environmental taxation are some of the priorities that have been set by the department of Montero.
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