The government has no other economic policy than the one it followsfake, increase spending exponentially and raise taxes in a confiscatory manner. He raised taxes every year and if he didn’t do it in any of them it’s because he didn’t have parliamentary support for it, but that’s his obsession: forcing taxpayers to continue spending inefficiently and wastefully, with considerable waste.
However, in its plan sent to Brussels with medium-term structural adjustments, obliged to be an economy with structural imbalances, collecting taxes on banks and energy companies to make them permanentafter announcing two years ago that they were temporary. There has always been a big doubt about its constitutionality, whatever a politicized CT says, because it was created specifically for certain sectors, but the transitional nature has calmed, in part, the minds of businesses, but this desire to perpetuating them ended with their patience.
In the case of bank tax, we can only speak of demagoguery in the choice of this tax; even greater demagoguery in the attempt to pass on the ban to customers, while banks would only ensure compliance with banking regulations which require them to maintain high solvency; and of great irresponsibility to want to apply a measure that could undermine both the aforementioned bank solvency, key to the market economy system that we have, and the volume of credit that they can grant, which would harm to the transmission of credit to the productive economy. , with its negative repercussions on growth and employment and which would end up interfering in the powers of the European Central Bank, by affecting the transmission of monetary policy, the exclusive competence of the issuing bank.
In the case of energy companiesif it is made permanent, they might reduce their offer due to increased costs that they cannot pass on. This would affect the customer through price and supply.
But what’s more, companies are starting to look to other destinations to make their investments. Repsol, probably the company that most clearly opposed these populist government measures, announced the suspension of many of its investments in Spain and the transfer of others to other destinations, such as Portugal . Cepsa, for its part, also announced that it was studying new destinations in the face of such government atrocities.
For his part, Banks are pushing for permanent approval of these taxes not to take place in Congressthat they could get If Junts and the PNV vote against.
In addition, this creates barriers to entry for new investments, which scares away, since any foreign company that considered investing in Spain reconsiders its project due to the existing tax populism.
This shows that governments can impose taxes, but taxpayers can walk away, what in economics and public finance is called “voting with their feet”. The government’s error and its confiscatory voracity will only lead to a decline in investment, prosperity and employmentthat is to say an impoverishment, which they will try to mask in the short term with more public spending, to make people believe that the economy is doing very well, but whose growth is unhealthy and counterproductive in the medium and long term. long term. More and more companies will vote with their feet and abandon Sánchez’s economic policies.
