The rice has been passed to the project of María Jesús Montero, the Minister of Finance, to limit the margins of the autonomous communities in some taxes such as heritage to avoid unfair competition between them. She, despite having talked a lot about the matter, has never believed she found the political conditions to undertake it.
Not only that, during this legislature the autonomous communities controlled by the PP have widened these differences to the point of paroxysm with Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, the Andalusian president, proclaiming from the rooftops that his goal is to attract residents from other communities, starting with Catalonia. . Also a trompe l'oeil to hide his main objective, that the hard core of his electoral body stop paying taxes and a part of him no longer has to travel so much by AVE to Madrid to show that he resides in the capital.
Now, with harmonization already impossible, the alternative is a new tax on the richest. After the Andalusian bugle call this past Monday, what the PP has set in motion is a domino effect, in a chain, whose foreseeable end will be the virtual disappearance of this wealth tax in all or most of Spain. Andalusia will probably be followed by Murcia and Castilla León; perhaps Galicia and Asturias.
The bastion of resistance will be concentrated in Levante, with Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia, as the most affected by the financing system. In the south, Extremadura will find it difficult to avoid the new regime implemented in adjoining Andalusia.
This perspective largely explains why the Government of Pedro Sánchez has decided to take the step towards a new temporary tax or rate. It is the alternative to the unnatural harmonization and also has the advantage that this time it will apply to all the wealthy affected by the new tax, regardless of the autonomous community in which they reside. It harmonizes through the facts, once the communities have recognized that they receive a competence to reject it, to convert it into a dead rate via an absolute rebate.
The Treasury could later negotiate with the communities to hand over the money collected in each of them in this way.
And for those who have maintained the wealth tax, it will represent compensation in the event that, finally, they choose to withdraw it in view of the image problems and tax escape that it generates.
In fact, something like this already happened when the government of the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero decided to abolish that wealth tax in 2008 and compensated the autonomous communities for the loss. However, the financial crisis led the socialist government to recover it, "temporarily", in 2011. And here we are.
Have Bonilla and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of Madrid, continuation of the line inaugurated back in 2005 by Esperanza Aguirre, tightened the rope so much that now they are going to find themselves without that competitive advantage achieved by taking advantage of privileges and with an unsupportive and fiscally irresponsible attitude? ?
With the new tax that the Government will impose from January, the communities that had suppressed heritage will be left without fiscal attractiveness, provided that the rest also discount it. We will have to see what resources Madrid uses to once again generate an advantageous difference with respect to the rest of the communities.
That seems to be the intention of Montero and the government team. The time has come to put the electoral arguments to the test. Among broad social sectors, tax cuts are fashionable, even among those who do not benefit from them. But there are also extensive nuclei of opinion that approve tougher taxation with large fortunes or high net worth. The demoscopy and especially the polls will say who takes the cat to the water.
