He estimates that the VAT reduction on food will only mean an average saving of just under 40 euros per family in the first semester

MADRID, 13 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (Fedea) considers "very positive" that the Government has replaced the general rebate on fuels with a battery of specific measures for the sectors most affected by the "substantial" savings that it will imply for public resources and because it will encourage energy saving and improve the distributive impact of the aid.

In a work by its executive director, Ángel de la Fuente, on the economic situation and the response given by Spain to the crisis in Ukraine, the body has urged the Executive to apply this "same logic" in the case of the reductions in taxes on energy and basic food to be replaced by direct and selective aid.

According to Fedea calculations, the VAT reduction on certain foods during the first half of this year will save consumers just under 40 euros per family on average, at current prices. In total, the fiscal cost will be around 700 million euros, of which "only 31% will be transferred in the form of savings to the two lower income quintiles."

According to Fedea's estimates, replacing the VAT reduction with direct aid concentrated in the 40% of households with the lowest income would cut the cost of the measure to a third of the current one or could multiply the average aid per beneficiary household by three. with the same added cost.

In any case, Fedea believes that it would be important to ensure that this aid would reach all its recipients quickly, including the least informed, so it is committed to investing in a system that allows funds to be sent quickly, via transfer or with less withholdings. personal income tax, to groups determined in accordance with objective conditions, such as income level and household size.

In this way, he points out, potential beneficiaries would save having to make an express request, avoiding delays in the arrival of aid.

For Fedea, the "most problematic" measures that the Government has adopted in recent months have been of a tax nature.

In this sense, he has criticized that the new taxes on the income of large energy companies and financial institutions and the complementary state tax on Wealth have been introduced in a law with a "hasty and unorthodox" processing procedure.

"In order to avoid the usual reports and filters, the rule has been processed as a bill, instead of as a bill, and it has even gone to the extreme of creating a new tax figure in a few days and without any filter through an amendment to a text already in an advanced stage of processing in which nothing was said about it", Fedea denounced.

Apart from the procedure, the entity considers that these three new taxes "are highly questionable" and understands that "the most worrying thing" in the text of the law is "the flagrant arbitrariness of some finger-picking on certain companies in certain sectors that do not respect the principle of equality and are not linked to objective factors, based only on mere presumptions and ideological prejudices, in clear violation of the Constitution and the General Tax Law".

In his opinion, the law contrasts "very unfavorably" with the community regulation that allows a solidarity tax on the extraordinary profits of energy companies, "calculated with clear criteria", so, for Fedea, it should adapt to said regulation.