The government has presented several budget news with doped figures, due to automatic calculations of taxes and grants.
The opposition believes that the government’s crunching of numbers lowers the credibility of politics.
Several of this year’s budget proposals have come up with figures that appear better than they are because of automatic tallies of taxes and grants to keep them in line with inflation. One such example was the government’s major investment in a new employment tax deduction. It was presented with a calculation example where a family would receive SEK 14,000 in tax relief per year. Only six hours later, when the proposal came in its entirety – it became clear that only SEK 7,000 was due to the new employment tax deduction. The rest was an automatic enumeration.
– You get the entire tax cut in the budget. We have never hidden that in any way. Since there are two parts, there is nothing strange about that, says Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson (M).
Worse than promised
The opposition is critical:
– It appears as if you want to deceive the voters. When you read the details, it was not as good as promised. And I think that lowers the credibility of the government, says Mikael Damberg, economic policy spokesperson for the Social Democrats
The same thing happened when the government presented its tax cut for pensioners: first, a pensioner with 25,000 a month in pension would get a tax cut of SEK 3,460. In retrospect, it became clear that only SEK 1,260 was the actual tax reduction – the rest was automatic.
The Minister: Not unclear
And when the government launched a tax cut on diesel by 43 öre, after indexation it turned out in fact to be a tax increase of 15 öre. Which was only clear if you read the government’s memorandum, which was published six hours after the press conference. But the finance minister does not think that the government has been unclear.
– All this shows that inflation has become very central. In the last two years, indexing has become important, and we are transparent and open. Sometimes it is complicated, but we are open, says Elisabeth Svantesson.
Mikael Damberg admits that the Social Democrats also do not have a completely clear conscience when it comes to working with numbers:
– Historically, we have also presented some news where all the details were not included. But we’ve tried to clear that up, because we don’t think we’ll win from it in the long term.