No one is bitter about a sweet except when it is suspected that it may be poisoned. Something similar sometimes happens to tax cuts. It happened in Great Britain with the hypnotic tax reduction proposed by Prime Minister Liz Truss and which ended her short-lived political career after the financial panic caused by her tax project (and its unsustainable imbalance between income and expenses). Now, the tax cuts are explained above all in electoral terms; and they are still a very sweet candy. How much? Well, it depends on each country. In Spain, according to the CIS barometer on fiscal policy for 2023, the majority of Spaniards are committed to maintaining (42%) or even increasing (39%) the tax pressure in exchange for preserving or improving public services.
From there it could be deduced that the PP and Vox policy of systematically reducing fiscal pressure does not have a long way to go nor should it provide too many electoral returns. 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 tax pressure 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 shows unprecedented figures: 41% believe that in Spain they pay less taxes than in the rest of the comparable EU countries, which is more than double that of ten years ago and triple that of twenty years ago. . And at the same time, less than 31% now consider that Spaniards pay more taxes than other Europeans; that is, between five and nine points below the highest records of the last decade. Finally, and for the first time in recent history, more people – almost half of the citizens – believe that Spanish society benefits a lot or quite a bit from what is paid in taxes. That rate fell to 27% ten years ago and is now above 49%.
However, as in so many other areas, polarization has also extended to the fiscal scenario and has led to the radicalization of some sectors that come to express a true tax phobia. And therein lies the electoral ground between PP and Vox, although with unequal emphasis. For example, while 55% of PSOE voters and 72% of Sumar voters defend an improvement in public services even if they have to pay more taxes, only 14% of popular voters (and less than 7% of those of Vox) shares this attitude.
In fact, more than 60% of PP voters and half of those on the far 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 (something that, attention, is also shared by one in ten socialist voters). But while 65% of PSOE or Sumar followers consider that society benefits a lot or quite a bit from taxes, that rate falls to 38% among the PP electorate and 25% among the Vox electorate. In reality, almost 63% of ultra voters (and a third of popular voters) perceive taxes as “an obligation imposed without knowing what 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 the fiscal pressure. Compared to 15% of center-left voters who consider that in Spain “they pay a lot of taxes”, this opinion reaches 60% of popular voters and 84% of Vox voters.
Of course, the perceived reality changes depending on who governs. For example, in 2016 – with the PP at the head of the Executive – the conviction among conservative voters that they were suffering from excessive fiscal pressure was up to 30 points below that registered today among Vox voters. Of course, among PSOE voters the opinion that Spaniards paid a lot of taxes was almost 50 points higher in 2016 (65%) than at present. Finally, seven years ago 47% of PP voters thought that Spanish society benefited quite a bit from taxes; and that rate was close to 54% during the Aznar Government in 1999. Today only 38% of popular voters think this way.
The paradox of the tax reductions that the right-wing parties have been applying to the highest incomes where they govern lies in the fact that this policy directly contradicts the majority perception of their own voters: 65% of PP voters (and more than 75% of those from Vox) consider that in Spain there is no “tax justice”, since “those who have the most do not pay more.”
