Everyone likes to be brushed off, except when the praise is suspected to be poisoned. A similar thing sometimes happens with tax cuts. It happened in Britain with the hypnotic tax cut proposed by Prime Minister Liz Truss and which ended her short-lived political career after the financial panic caused by her tax plan (and its unsustainable imbalance between income and expenses). Now, the tax cuts are mainly explained in electoral terms, and they are still quite a sweet treat. How? Well, it depends on each country. In Spain, according to the CIS barometer on fiscal policy for 2023, the majority of Spaniards favor maintaining (42%) or even increasing (39%) the tax pressure in exchange for preserving or improving public services.
From here it could be deduced that the policy of the Popular Party and Vox to systematically reduce fiscal pressure does not have an excessive course nor should it report many electoral gains. After all, almost 80% of Spaniards defend the need for taxes so that the State can provide services or redistribute wealth. And at the same time, the number of citizens who consider the fiscal pressure in Spain to be excessive is the lowest in history: less than 38% (compared to 68% in 2013 or 66% in previous decades).
What’s more, the comparison with Europe registers unprecedented figures: 41% believe that Spain pays less tax than the rest of the comparable EU countries, that is, more than twice as much as ten years ago and three times as much as twenty years ago years. And at the same time, now less than 31% consider that the Spanish pay more taxes than the rest of the Europeans; that is to say, between five and nine points below the highest records of the last decade. Finally, and for the first time in recent history, there are more people – almost half of the citizens – who think that Spanish society benefits a lot or a lot from what is paid in taxes. This rate fell to 27% ten years ago and is now over 49%.
However, as in so many other areas, polarization has also spread to the tax scene and has led to the radicalization of some sectors that come to express a true tax phobia. And here is the electoral trap that PP and Vox are disputing, although with unequal emphasis. For example, while 55% of PSOE voters and 72% of Sumar voters defend an improvement of public services even if it is necessary to tax more, only 14% of popular voters (and less than 7% of Vox voters) they share this attitude.
In fact, more than 60% of the voters of the PP and half of those on the ultra-right prefer to freeze the current tax pressure. However, one in five popular voters, and almost 40% of Vox voters, choose to pay less taxes even if this means reducing public services. And while 65% of PSOE or Sumar supporters consider that society benefits a lot or a lot from taxes, this rate drops to 38% among the PP electorate and 25% among Vox. In reality, almost 63% of ultra voters (and a third of popular voters) perceive taxes as “an obligation imposed without knowing in exchange for what”.
But the key that would explain the tax cuts promoted by right-wing parties could be found in the perception that their voters have about fiscal pressure. 15% of centre-left voters consider that in Spain “a lot of taxes are paid”, while this opinion reaches 60% of popular voters and 84% of Vox voters.
Of course, the perceived reality changes depending on who governs the country. For example, in 2016 – with the PP at the head of the Spanish Executive – the conviction among conservative voters that they were suffering from excessive fiscal pressure was around 30 points below what is recorded today among Vox voters. It is clear that among PSOE voters the opinion that the Spanish paid a lot of taxes was almost 50 points higher in 2016 (65%) than today. Finally, seven years ago 47% of PP voters thought that Spanish society benefited a lot from taxes, and this rate almost reached 54% during Aznar’s government, in 1999. Today only 38% think so of popular voters.
The paradox posed by the tax reductions that the right-wing formations apply to the highest incomes lies in the fact that this policy directly contradicts the majority perception of their own voters: 65% of the voters of the PP (and more than 75 % of those from Vox) consider that there is no “fiscal justice” in Spain, since “those who have the most don’t pay more”.
