The former minister of the Zapatero cabinet and former economic adviser to Pedro Sánchez in his years as a socialist candidate for the Presidency of the Government, Jordi Sevilla, encouraged the Executive on Tuesday to adopt a more proactive role to promote an ‘income pact’ and to accept the offer made by the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to agree on the deflation of the personal income tax rate in the sections in which the medium and low incomes fall.
«I have the feeling that there has not been much will on the part of the social agents to agree on an ‘income agreement’, which in my opinion is fundamental in the current context, and I have missed a little more of a greasing will on the part of of the Government”, said Sevilla, during a talk on the efficiency of public spending organized by the Institute of Economic Studies and the College of Economists of Spain.
The proposal of the popular ones, included in the package of measures that Núñez Feijóo sent by letter to Pedro Sánchez on the eve of the approval of the Government’s shock plan against inflation, proposed updating the personal income tax income thresholds for all taxpayers with annual income of less than 40,000 euros, as a way to prevent their possible salary increases as a result of inflation from leading them to pay more taxes. The measure potentially affected 80% of taxpayers with income from work and, as estimated by the PP, would have a budgetary cost of 1,500 million euros in the event of an update of 5%. Organizations such as the College of Economists or the Bank of Spain have valued the measure for its selective nature and its orientation towards the most vulnerable segments of the population.
However, the Government flatly ruled out considering it under the argument that this measure would also indirectly benefit “those who earn more than 300,000 euros,” according to the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero.
