The core has reached an agreement on the flight tax. Anyone flying beyond Europe will also have to pay a tax.
–
The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Ministers are very close to making a final decision on the mini-tax shift. During the preparation of the budget, it was agreed that the special contribution for social security – an archaic tax – would already be reduced by 200 million euros this year. Minister of Finance Vincent Van Peteghem (CD&V) has the ambition to abolish that tax completely, but that will cost 1.2 billion euros. That is why we work in disks.
• Lower energy bill causes high voltage in De Croo government
To finance that tax reduction, higher excise duties on tobacco, the reform of the scheme whereby the employer is not required to transfer a part of the payroll tax and the flight tax will be considered. A consensus had already been reached on the first two financing sources, and now the core has also reached an agreement on the flight tax. If you take a flight of less than 500 kilometers, you will have to pay 10 euros boarding tax. The train can be a perfect alternative for that distance. For longer flights within Europe, the tax is 2 euros. And for all other flights, 4 euros will be charged. The MR has therefore definitively dropped its objections to a tax that affects all flights. The tax must bring in 30 million euros.
Who benefits from tax cuts?
What is still under discussion is who can benefit from the tax cut. The core has set a number of parameters and engineers are now once again figuring out the various possible scenarios that fit into it. In one of those scenarios, it is considered to reserve the tax reduction only for those with a family income between 75,000 and 82,000 euros. In another scenario, the reduction quickly extinguishes for the higher incomes. In between, the tax reduction would amount to between 50 and 250 euros per year. After all, it was agreed during the budget preparation that the tax cut would ‘should increase purchasing power for low and middle wages and reduce the promotion trap’. Calculating everything again quickly takes a few hours, you can hear. After that, all that numerical work goes to a meeting of the heads of cabinet. If they can reach an agreement that gets the approval of their respective ministers, then the matter is over and the file does not have to go to the core again. Whether that still works today is still unclear.
–
