MADRID, 23 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
United We Can wants the coalition government and, especially the Ministry of Finance, to develop advertising campaigns to explain to citizens the social role that the taxes they pay fulfill and thus combat the messages in favor of generalized reductions in taxes that contribute to ” discredit” of them.
With this objective, the minority partner of the Executive has registered a non-law proposal in Congress summoning the launch of announcements that “value the important role” that taxes play “in the improvement and reinforcement” of the Welfare State and in the “protection of the general interest” in extraordinary situations such as the coronavirus pandemic or the rise in energy prices.
In its initiative, collected by Europa Press, United We Can points out that during “the last three years, the State Tax Administration Agency has had a budget of more than 9 million euros for advertising and propaganda that it has barely invested.”
In fact, he points out that the last advertising campaign carried out by the AEAT, as stated on its website, is from 2014 and in the eight years since then “the social role of taxes has not been valued again, how it is done usually in other countries.
For United We Can, it is necessary to use this money to promote campaigns aimed at curbing the “degradation” that, they lament, suffers from “the image of taxes” and to prevent the “aversion” to paying them that is promoted from different sectors from continuing to grow.
At this point, they censor the positions defended by “liberal” parties and some media, the “fraudulent and immoral behavior of certain people with public relevance”, the “strategies to distort and stigmatize in public opinion some of the taxes that affect to the richest people” and even “the advertising promotions of the ‘days without VAT'” of large businesses.
For the confederal group, it is necessary to counteract “the message of uselessness that is transmitted by implementing a reduction in taxes on certain goods and services without reporting their possible social and economic impact.”
United We Can review that this “problem of awareness and image of taxes” occurs in Spain despite the fact that our country is one of the European countries with the lowest fiscal pressure. In this context, it provides Eurostat data from 2019 according to which it was 35.4% compared to the average for the euro zone (41.4%) and for countries such as France (47.1%), Italy (42.4% ) or Germany (42.5%).
In addition, the minority partner of the Government emphasizes that in Spain the payment of taxes is questioned but “continually calls for an increase in financial support for different sectors and economic groups.”
For all these reasons, it calls for campaigns to be launched to make it clear that taxes are essential for sustaining the welfare state, but also to guarantee the protection of those who need it from the public sector, deploying mechanisms that serve to mitigate the social impact and economic crisis such as those experienced in recent times.
