The Government made official on Sunday in the BOE the approval of the fiscal package approved on Thursday in Congress, which establishes measures such as the tax on banking commissions and interests, a new global minimum tax of 15% for multinational companies or the tax on vapers, among other taxes. This tax reform approved in the Lower House with the votes of the Government and its usual partners (ERC, Junts, Podemos, Bildu and Canary Coalition) will further increase the tax pressure on companies and citizens, already in record numbers. Thus, the Executive of Pedro Sánchez will end this year with a tax collection 88,000 million above what was in 2018, when his first term began – 85,000 million in taxes and personal income tax and another 2,859 from temporary taxes on banking and energy. –, “which proves that the Government has raised all taxes on Spaniards and, therefore, there has been an increase in collection,” they recall from the Popular Party, which points out that only In social contributions, 50,000 million will have been collected by the end of this year above the collection in 2018.
Therefore, in total, between the Treasury and Social Security, close to 140,000 million more will have been collected than in 2018 – 323,717 million in that year compared to 461,718 million in the year that is about to end –, 43% more. Compared to 2023, an extra 32,283 million will be collected at the end of this year. “Taxes have been raised 81 times by the Government, plus the latest blow approved last week, which will mean that Spaniards pay another 9,000 million more taxes at a minimum,” say the PP, which to assess the effect of personal income tax Regarding “this very important increase in total collection of more than 60%, it would be necessary to take into account other variables that allow us to observe how the non-deflation of the rate is what partly leads to this increase.”
As they explain, the growth in collection of 30% is not in line with that of GDP, which has increased by 21.43%, nor with those affiliated with Social Security –9.2% more–, “which proves that the increase in collection is largely due to an increase in parameters such as membership, but another very important part has been produced by the increase in taxes. A reality that becomes clearer if the comparison is made between income tax collection versus an increase in employment. While the first has shot up by 45%, the second has shot up by 9.20%.
In social contributions alone, the difference between the year 2018 (114,999 million) and 2024 until November (151,606 million) points to a difference of 36,000 million. If the forecasts made by the PP are met, at the end of this year 2024 the collection of social contributions will end up above 165,000 million, which represents 50,000 million more than in 2018, an increase of 43.5% and 11,000 million above the year 2023.
The increase in fiscal pressure has placed our country as the fifth OECD country in which the weight of taxation has increased the most between 2010 and 2023, already representing 37.3% of GDP, thus exceeding the average of the 33.9%. During these 13 years, taxes and social contributions in Spain grew more than six points of GDP, a figure only surpassed by Japan (8.2 points), Slovakia (7.6), Greece (7.5) and South Korea. South (6.5). The OECD estimates that the greatest weight in Spain’s tax revenue corresponded to Social Security contributions, with 34.1%, compared to the OECD average of 24.8%, while income taxes from Individuals accounted for 24.1%, compared to the average of 23.6% in the organization.
And this pressure will increase. Pedro Sánchez already warned at the beginning of September at the opening ceremony of the political course that there is still room for a tax increase of 60,000 million euros. This amount corresponds to the four percentage points of GDP to which the fiscal pressure gap between Spain and the European Union average amounts.
For Yolanda Díaz, second vice president and leader of Sumar, these figures fall short and she defends that the fiscal pressure must be raised even above those four points after warning that with the INE’s review of the GDP figures, that distance can be closed. raise up to seven more points and add another 80,000 million euros of tax pressure.
For the PP, this revision of the GDP by Statistics “has occurred mainly on internal demand and public spending. So if growth is based on public spending and this is against debt, Spain has a serious problem that is going to complicate our future.”
The IEE, in its latest report on tax competitiveness, with data from Eurostat, found that workers and employers face an increase in the tax effort almost 18% above the European Union, with a tax pressure of 39%, just one point of the community average. An increase in the tax burden that has come from the introduction of new taxes and the reform or upward transformation of existing taxes, with a direct impact on taxation and business contributions, savings and investment.
Despite these continued tax collection records, public debt has skyrocketed to record figures, above 1.63 trillion.