The House of Representatives is debating our country’s household budget, the Spring Memorandum. Tax or cut? is there the question. In addition, it is about the note itself. It is ‘messy and opaque’, according to the Council of State. MPs are also critical.
According to VVD MP Eelco Heinen, we are at a tipping point: “We come from a time when money seemed free for the government, but are now approaching the limits. To keep public finances healthy, we will probably spend 10 to cut 20 billion euros.”
Inequality
GroenLinks party chairman Jesse Klaver thinks this is nonsense: “The VVD always thinks that we can do with less money. In the past, this has led to major problems in the public sector,” he says.
“We need to do something about inequality: that large companies and the people with the most money in our country pay less tax than ordinary working people.”
‘No more free beer’
Professor of economics Bas Jacobs is pleased with the attention paid to healthy government finances: “It is good that the focus has shifted from years of handing out free beer to a slightly more careful approach to the budget.”
He calls ‘a political consideration’ whether that ‘making things healthy’ is done through cutbacks, as the VVD wants, or more taxes, as advocated by GroenLinks.
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Messy and opaque
In the Spring Memorandum, the government omits drastic cutbacks. Minister Sigrid Kaag of Finance has used the ‘cheese slicer’: that is, each ministry gives up a relatively small amount of budget. This saves a total of approximately 3 billion euros.
But figuring out exactly where cuts are being made is not easy. The Council of State, the cabinet’s most important advisory body, calls this Spring Memorandum ‘messy and opaque’. For example, a good overview of cutbacks, windfalls and setbacks cannot be found.
‘Craft work’
Professor Jacobs says that he has ‘never seen such a chaotic budget’ in his working life. He thinks this is a major democratic problem: “If advisory boards can no longer make good sense of this, then parliament cannot properly monitor the government.”
GroenLinks leader Klaver calls the memorandum ‘mess work’. “We had to ask no fewer than 700 additional questions to get more clarity. The memorandum is a reflection of problems in the coalition. We waited until the very last moment to draw up this budget. you get these kinds of accidents.”
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‘More not always better’
The VVD partly agrees with this. Member of Parliament Eelco Heinen: “As a House you want clear overviews, that really has to be improved next time. On the other hand, the House of Representatives itself is asking for more and more information.”
“But ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better’,” he concludes.
Watch the TV report on the Spring Memorandum here: cut back or not?
