By: ddr. Štefan Šumah
We find ourselves in a situation that would be amusing if it were not so sad. Branimir Štrukelj (together with the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia) wants to take from my parents an amount almost equal to one of my mother’s monthly pensions each year. Both are retired after completing full careers. My mother worked in accounting, while my father was a miner. Today, together they receive just under €1,900 in pension income. And now the state is supposed to take several hundred euros from that modest amount, or otherwise leave them with less disposable income.
But let us look at the matter through actual bills and figures rather than political slogans. My parents pay roughly €400 a year for electricity and about €3,600 for heating oil. Together, that comes to approximately €4,000 in energy costs. If the Law on Emergency Measures for Slovenia’s Development, including the VAT reduction, were to come into force, they would save around €400 a year on energy products. A further €100 or so would come from reducing VAT from 9.5 percent to 5 percent. Altogether, that amounts to roughly €700. Seven hundred euros. A sum that comes dangerously close to one of my mother’s monthly pensions.
And this is where the full beauty of our welfare state reveals itself. The state first takes money, channels it through the tax system, and then redistributes it among programmes, institutions, agencies, NGOs, and other beneficiaries. Of course, solidarity is important, especially when someone else is paying for it. These calculations are based on my parents’ actual utility bills and receipts. Some people would benefit more from the emergency law, others less. The essential point is simple: nobody would be worse off, while many would be better off.
True, there are exceptions. And it is precisely these exceptions that have become the main argument of the law’s opponents. They concern roughly 1.5 percent of employees who would receive significantly larger benefits from certain measures. And here we encounter a distinctly Slovenian characteristic. Instead of asking how to improve the situation of the other 98.5 percent, we ask why someone in that 1.5 percent might receive more. Envy, it seems, is one of the few goods we still distribute without restriction.
Štrukelj and his associates build their argument around precisely these rare cases. They point to those who would gain the most and then explain to the public that solidarity requires the state not to take less, but rather to take as much as possible and then decide for itself how to redistribute it.
Taxes should be as low as possible, and the state should handle public money with a trembling hand. Less unnecessary spending, fewer projects that exist only for their own sake, less clientelism, and as little room for corruption as possible. If the state has enough money for projects, subsidies, NGOs, politically popular measures, and ever-new forms of redistribution, but somehow lacks the funds to allow people to keep more of what they earn, then perhaps the problem is not that citizens pay too little.
Perhaps it would finally be fair to ask a different question: not how much more the state can take, but how much it should leave to its citizens. After all, money that remains in a person’s wallet is not a cost to the state. It is that person’s money. And the state ought finally to remember that fact, before solidarity comes to mean little more than everyone being in solidarity with the state treasury.