Anyone who places political demands under slogans such as “equality”, “harmonization” or “abolition of disadvantages” is usually committing fraudulent labels. The most recent examples are provided by the two new popular initiatives by the Mitte party.
The true goals of popular initiatives often remain in the shadows.
Switzerland, it seems, is full of disadvantaged people. Women, men, boys, girls, pensioners, employed, old, young, married, cohabiting couples, single people: a story can be constructed for all of them in which they appear as “disadvantaged” in some way. Political parties and other lobbyists often present their demands under well-sounding slogans such as “equality”, “harmonization” or “end discrimination”. But such slogans are usually only cloaks intended to disguise the true intentions.
The latest example was provided by the Mitte party on Tuesday with the launch of two popular initiatives. The party’s tax initiative is rumored to end the federal marriage penalty. And the pension initiative is intended to eliminate the disadvantage for married couples by capping the married couple’s pension at 150 percent (instead of 200 percent) of the single-person pension. But in reality it’s about something else.
The other side of the coin
The first thing to remember is a principle that is so banal that it is usually forgotten: if there are “disadvantaged”, then by definition there are also “privileged”. If, for example, the married are “disadvantaged”, then the cohabiting couples and/or the singles are automatically “privileged”. So those who want equality in such a situation can achieve it in three ways: betterment for the disadvantaged, worsening for the privileged, or a combination of both.
If you want to know whether someone honestly only cares about equality, this is easy to find out: Such lobbyists do not mind if there are adjustments downwards (by reducing privileges) or if the adjustments are made symmetrically – about half each through betterment of the disadvantaged and worse off of the privileged. But lobbyists usually want little or nothing to do with such adjustments.
For example, while unions have long demanded gender equality in wages, it has never occurred to them to accept pay cuts for men. The purpose of the women’s issue here is to provide another argument for additional wage increases. For similar reasons, no symmetrical changes were envisaged in earlier popular initiatives to adjust cantonal child allowances or cantonal scholarships, but upward harmonization with minimum requirements. The AHV reform, which was narrowly approved by the people last month and raised the retirement age for women from 64 to 65, brought about equality by abolishing a privilege as an exception, but this reform was fiercely opposed by precisely those circles that call for equality the loudest.
And the revision of the film law (“Lex Netflix”), which was accepted by the people this May, should, according to the proponents, among other things, “level the tables” – with quotas for Swiss films not only as before for private Swiss TV channels, but also for the Swiss program windows of foreign providers and for streaming services. Hardly anyone was interested in the fact that the same level of play could have been achieved by abolishing the previous quotas for private Swiss TV channels. Here, too, the alleged “equality” only served as a cover for the purpose of expansion.
The hidden motives
And now the two new Mitte initiatives on taxes and pensions are swimming in the same water. In both cases it is not about “equality” between married and unmarried people. This is already clear in the initiative texts themselves: the disadvantages of the married should disappear, but the privileges should remain. The texts of the initiative expressly rule out symmetrical harmonization (pensions initiative) or make it extremely difficult in practice (tax initiative).
In the case of the tax initiative, the label “Ending the Marriage Penalty” serves as a cover for the main goal of the initiators: election campaigns for the party and tax cuts for high-income married couples. At least here the initiators can rightly claim that there are currently more disadvantaged couples than privileged couples when it comes to direct federal taxes – and that on balance there is a marriage penalty. The opposite is the case with AHV. According to the Federal Council’s most recent estimate for 2018, there are privileges for married couples (especially widow’s pensions) totaling CHF 3.2 billion and disadvantages (ceiling of the married couple’s pension) totaling CHF 2.8 billion. On balance, this makes a marriage bonus of CHF 400 million per year. Added to this would be the subsidization of married couples by unmarried people in the second pillar of old-age provision.
The equality argument for the middle pension initiative is absurd anyway, because almost all couples of retirement age are married. This was the case in 2018 according to the federal statisticians for 93 percent. The comparison with cohabiting couples of retirement age is essentially a phantom comparison. And if you still want an alignment, it would be logical to adapt the small minority to the large majority and not vice versa. But the Central Initiative expressly demands the opposite. So it’s not about equality here either, but about something completely different: election campaigns at the expense of the AHV and blanket pension increases in the billions at the expense of younger people under a nice-sounding label.