The coalition's decision to hike VAT by three percentage points will lead to considerable increases in prices and the slightly lower VAT on foodstuffs won't offset that, MP Stefan Kiss (PS) commented on consolidation measures.
"The 3-percent VAT hike will mean a significant increase in prices that's going to hit everyone. The slightly lower VAT on foodstuffs will fall rather short of offsetting that," Kiss opined.
One of the announced 2025 consolidation measures is also the introduction of 10-percent cuts to public administration employment, which is supposed to save state coffers €124 million. According to Kiss, the government has no plans to apply austerity measure to itself and the 10-percent layoffs in the state administration are the only measure to limit its expenditure. "We have reasonable concerns that this will be chaotic and only detrimental to Slovakia," said Kiss.
The newly-unveiled consolidation measures will yield less income to the state than planned and common people of Slovakia are going to bear the brunt of the pain, opposition SaS Vice-chair Marian Viskupic claimed on Tuesday.
"Every single citizen will pay more in their taxes, levies and fees. When the state comes up with new taxes for firms, new levies, new charges for firms, and, unfortunately, this government has come up with a lot of them in the material passed, the overwhelming bulk of these additional costs will simply be passed on to the people. General estimates say that about 80 percent of any new costs you saddle businesses with are simply passed on to their clients and that means the people of this country," said Viskupic.
By hiking VAT to 23 percent, the state will take €570 out of the pocket of an average family throughout the year and that's only VAT alone, 'Slovensko' party leader Igor Matovic declared at a press conference on Tuesday.
"They're ushering in a new tax on financial transactions, to be applicable only to businesses and tradespeople. However, what they omitted to say was that almost one-third of this tax is planned to be collected from businesses and tradespeople sending salaries to their employees. So it can be said that the tax on financial transactions will have an impact on common people as well," said Matovic.
Matovic also lambasted the coalition for enabling two percent of employee taxes, deducted off their salaries once a year, to go either to their parents or the nonprofit sector.
Source: TASR
