The left has again successfully blocked a tax reform in parliament with a referendum. The bourgeois plan to abolish the special tax on new equity failed due to a mixture of disinterest, economic criticism and fear of loss.
The voting proposal to abolish the special tax on new equity was under an unfavorable star from the start.
New tax referendum from the left, new success. After the campaigns against the reform of company taxes in 2017 and against the increase in child deductions in 2021, the SP has now also achieved a clear majority in the ballot box with the fight against the abolition of the emission tax on company equity.
The voting proposal was under an unfavorable star from the start. Most citizens do not feel affected by this emissions tax. Business support for the bill, meanwhile, was lukewarm. The emission levy carries too little weight to credibly serve as a massive brake on the economy. The timing of the election was also unfavorable for the abolitionists. Switzerland looks back on two years of a pandemic with a massive increase in federal debt. At such a moment, many don’t think of tax cuts first.
All of this doesn’t mean that abolishing the issuance tax was a lousy idea. On the contrary: the special tax on equity is a particularly bad tax. If a company finds investors for a capital increase, for example to finance research, it must immediately hand over 1 percent of the new capital to the federal government – before it has even earned a single franc with the money and even if it has only been making losses for years. The thesis of the referendum leaders of the emissions tax as a substitute for the exclusion of certain financial services from VAT was a smokescreen. This also applies to the reference to the Corona crisis – which was instrumentalized by both sides in the voting campaign.
If there were no such emissions tax in Switzerland today, as in most other countries, a popular initiative to introduce it would probably fail. But this tax has been around for a long time, and the status quo carries great weight in the human psyche.
The referendum leaders’ campaign was effective, if misleading. The class struggle rhetoric along the lines of “evil capital is constantly being relieved while the good workers are constantly paying more” was misleading and hypocritical. The left is also fighting against personal tax cuts and is the main driver behind the rise in wage deductions and VAT.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric game about the “bad, profitable big corporations versus the good SMEs” is as popular on the left and right as it is hypocritical. This was shown by the parallel controversy about media subsidies: there, the right suddenly shot at a referendum proposal with the comment that “the big ones benefit most” – while the left tried with all their might to justify it.
But voting battles have never been for ethics. After its recent defeat, the economy has to take matters into its own hands. General advice such as “strengthening the location” and “securing jobs” are no longer sufficient for a win at the ballot box.
The focus of politics today is far less on enlarging the pie than on dividing it up. Swiss prosperity is considered a law of nature. “The economy” has, however, made significant contributions to the poisoning of political hummus. Keywords are well known: financial crisis, regular scandals in the executive floors, alienation of global corporations from the “native” soil and top wages, which many ordinary people do not understand. This hummus can also play an important role in the next test case in tax policy – when the people are expected to decide on the reform of the withholding tax this autumn.