02/18/2021 19:41
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 02/19/2021 12:05 AM
The Income Tax was born under another name and was created by a de facto President who is now a school.
What did not change was the meaning of its existence:
alleviating the fiscal deficit
.
José Félix Uriburu, who had overthrown Hipólito Yrigoyen, implemented it in 1932 as a
“tax on income”
, but it only affected companies and certain million-dollar investments.
Believe it or not, it was Perón who, forty years later, created the
"fourth category"
that includes wage earners.
The taxpayer base began to expand.
And it
did not stop more
.
In 1999, Minister José Luis Machinea, during the De la Rúa government, created a
"Tablita"
that stretched the incidence of the tax to 35% of wages, with cases in which it could exceed 40%.
The part of
La Tablita
that modified the scale of the aliquots was transitory.
No more was taken out
.
In 2015 Macri campaigned promising that he would eliminate the Income Tax from wages.
It didn't, and the number of taxpayers reached
doubled
.
Every announcement about the tax to change the distorting scope that all governments admit but none solves occurs, always, in
electoral years
.
Now he returned to the ring and Congress will debate a rise in the floor so that it does not reach gross salaries of less than 150,000 pesos, as proposed by deputy Sergio Massa.
But the real distortion has a larger dimension, reaching
unusual edges
.
This Tuesday, the Carnival holiday, the Toyota operators at the Zárate plant - a model factory that Cristina Kirchner, Scioli, Macri, María Eugenia Vidal, Alberto Fernández and Kicillof have visited - preferred not to work because of the extra hours that corresponded to them for the day. non-working would be taken almost entirely by the tax.
That is, if they worked more, they would end up receiving
proportionally less
.
More hours worked was
more tax
for the treasury but, in proportion,
less income
for the operator.
At the end of the month, the difference between working or not working that holiday would be laughable.
As Earnings is a progressive tax, the one who charges the most has the most discount, even if it is overtime.
For example, if a single person without children who charges $ 100,000 out of pocket and for overtime adds 10% more, he will end up paying tax
70% more
than if he had not done them.
The distortion of the tax is exacerbated when, like last year, wages lose to inflation but also
pay more tax
.
This is so because the updating of the minimums in the scales was below the salary increases and
more and more people had to pay more tax even if they earned less
.
Due to being shut down on Tuesday, the Toyota plant - which pulls out
a finished truck every 90 seconds
- lost from producing 600 Hilux pickups and the SW4 all-terrain vehicle, most of which were to be exported, with taxes being levied on the part. of the State.
The export amount of that single-day production is equivalent to
10 million dollars
(25,000 dollars for 400 pickups sold to Brazil and other Latin American countries).
Now, what the State
stopped charging
for the export of those trucks far exceeds
what it would have collected from Profits
to the wages of the workers who would have produced them, if that had not meant paying more tax.
The other 200 pickups that were not manufactured were going to the domestic market.
From that part of the production, the State stopped collecting at least 400 million pesos more for the zero kilometer tax.
This happens while the Foreign Ministry has just agreed with Chile so that trucks manufactured in Argentina enter that country with zero tariffs, as a competitive advantage against Chinese vehicles, for example.
That is, when
more trucks will be needed to export
.
The chronic deficit and the need to increase taxes to solve it is not enough to justify that the State itself remains locked in an absurd labyrinth, where in the end
it cuts income from itself
.
