Forum: No taxes, double salary, separate services

Paying for firefighters, healthcare, and street cleaners without taxes

Two people fight on a Saturday night in a nightclub and both file complaints. In a tax-free scenario, each would hire their own justice company—one, 'Juezsegur'; another, 'Ley Iberia'—and someone would have to decide which sentence counts. The scene serves to measure how far the argument of a current opinion goes: abolishing all taxes and paying for each service at the moment of use. Firefighters included. Street cleaners, too.

Removing taxes: from a salary of 1,500 to 3,000

The starting point holds that, with the disappearance of the 30% business contribution and the 20-40% personal income tax (IRPF), the worker would earn practically double: an average salary of 1,500 euros would rise to 3,000. Products would cost between 10% and 20% less by removing the value-added tax (VAT), so the money would go further. And companies, without VAT on sales, without contributions, and without the 25% on profits, would double earnings, invest, and hire. With full employment, salaries would rise again: not double, 'perhaps 2.5 times.'

Not everyone buys this arithmetic. The same text admits that public pensions, public education, and public healthcare disappear, and replaces them with specific prices: a health insurance for 350 euros a year, an average private school for 250 euros a month. With these 300 euros monthly, he says, the impact would be 15% of the salary already without taxes. The sarracena is the usual one: everyone saves for unemployment and retirement.

Healthcare for 350 euros a year: the bill that doesn't add up

There the consensus breaks. According to an intervention in the thread, Spanish public healthcare spending is around 2,000 euros per person per year, and a family of four would need about 8,000 euros annually before adding business profit. Cheap insurance works, it is argued, because serious and expensive cases are still covered by public healthcare: the real surgeon is not the client of the low-cost policy.

The fine print does not end there. According to a message citing the European transparency register, several Spanish private healthcare associations spent 200,000 euros in 2018 on lobbying in Brussels. And the objection is not only economic. For another participant, a dentist, skin, traumatology, or psychologist are already largely paid out of pocket today, so the line separating public and private has been blurred for years. That said, public healthcare would still cover surgeries, according to that intervention.

Pensions: from two workers per pensioner to one

The pension system is the argument with the most numbers and least agreement. The initial proposal holds that with two workers supporting each pensioner, the account no longer works; in ten years, there will be one for each retiree, and future benefits would be half the current ones, with the series falling year after year. Paying today by force more than double what will be received in three decades is, in this reading, the definition of a bad deal.

The reply points to the mechanism, not the diagnosis: if contributions disappear, there is no reason to think that money ends up in the paycheck rather than the employer's pocket. Pensions, they recall, are an insurance implemented by Bismarck and reformed later in Spain, not a favor. Another line of response focuses on demographics: if birth rates had remained, the fund would hold.

Streetlights, street cleaners, and police by subscription

Lighting, cleaning, and security are the terrain where the ideal is measured against reality. A street cleaner hired by a homeowners' association who performs poorly is replaced; a security company that does not protect property loses the contract. The argument of the sovereign consumer, applied to public security, clashes with an uncomfortable question: do you change your police when your neighborhood is poorly guarded, or do you change neighborhoods?

Local taxation comes into play strongly. Who pays more property tax (IBI) for living in a house with a garden does not pay only for their streetlight: they also support, for example, the venue for the festivals where Amaral performs, which is not always on their street. The defense of the municipal tax responds that more land, more infrastructure, and more value require more contribution, and that proportionality is the only viable rule. Pay-per-use has its own trap: if the asphalt and light are only mine, every neighbor passing by will have to pay me the bill.

The 5% income of the sixties

To demonstrate that there was a country with almost no taxes and services, we turn to the Spain before democracy: 'testimonial' taxes, around 5% of income, and still army, public works, night watchmen, prisons, schools, and reservoirs, financed by state companies. The final blow is inflation: in 1960 it fell to 1% and on several occasions was zero.

The counter-reply is equally forceful. That era was not a fiscal Arcadia: taxes are as old as armies, and Social Security contributions date back at least to the sixties. The monetary policy of then, moreover, is described as a machine for issuing banknotes that accelerated and slowed down as convenient, with inflation peaks much higher than those in the years of democracy. Taxes existed, although they were collected in a different way.

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In the background remains the disconcerting figure: between 10% and 15% of revenue would be enough, according to the initial proposal, to maintain judges, police, and temporary insertion incomes, with school and medical checks for low incomes. It remains to be seen how much the rest would cost—the street cleaners, the firefighters, the streetlights, and the asphalt—nor who pays the nightclub bill when the two clients of private justice do not agree.