Environmental taxes left or right?

Its primary purpose is not or should not be financial. they should mainly pursue a main target of environmental protection, not an income target.This is a non-financial goal. Its purpose should not be to collect but to influence certain behaviors or activities that may affect the environment.If it is done, it creates a high tax burden for them. Like this, a low collection of these taxes indicates the achievement of the environmental targets pursued.Because there would be no polluting activities that harm the environment and cause such taxes to be incurred.

This financial instruments They tend to greatly worry citizens who see the increased tax burden they bear, and no matter how much the reasons for each tax are explained, they are not well received by the sentiments of domestic economies. At the same time, taxes and public accounts become a launcher in political warsespecially at election time.

In any case, much of the environmental tax pile is not as visible to citizens as other general taxes, but is somehow passed on to the citizen, legally or economically.

Tax war in the election campaign

in their time successive political elections, preceded by a long period of very strong droughtwhere possible effects of climate changeenvironmental protection cannot be a political weapon that is thrown because it has found its foundation. Environmental protection power of Article 45 of the Spanish Constitution. Given the instinctively disturbing vision they evoke in taxpayers, such protection becomes even more so when instrumentalized through taxes.

Taxes are often put on the political battlefield, where the concepts of right and left continue to be applied, however fuzzy when rigorously analysed. Environmental taxes should be left out of this political wrestling game more than any other.. Especially when you want to mistakenly ascribe to this type of tax allegiance to a political ideology that doesn’t really fit into the fiscal policy schemes with which they align.

If we had to highlight the most traditional environmental tax that has the greatest impact on citizens, hydrocarbon tax this taxes diesel and gasoline, among others. It is a harmonized tax. European Union directives Which determines a structure and minimum tax to be applied by Member States and which they can generally raise and raise when imposing on their territory.

This tax, as a custom manufacturing tax, taxing hydrocarbon production. Unlike VAT, it is applied in a single stage and this does not prevent it from passing openly to the consumer. Although the manufacturer legally enters the Treasury and legally transfers it to the buyer of the product – whether to the wholesaler or the retailer – in the first stage of the distribution process, The larger the amount payable as a result of the tax, the higher the price that must be charged to the final consumer to be transferred economically to the final consumer..

So, about a tax on fuel consumption and the fact that it is of great revenue-enhancing importance, which casts doubt on whether the intended purpose pursued by such a tax is purely environmental. To do this, there must be a tax articulated without consuming significant amounts of hydrocarbons (mainly diesel and gasoline), generating only a minimal collection and very little pollution by road traffic.

Fuel consumption between rich and poor

In practice, it has an unrealistic environmental goal, since it is clear that existing infrastructure and means of transport do not allow a large proportion of citizens of any economic level to avoid fuel consumption and bet on an electric vehicle that truly meets all their needs.

For example, let’s consider in rural or empty Spainwhere it is not possible to consider stopping consuming these products, many of which are subject to the hydrocarbon tax, given the specific individual transport need, and many in need of protection, The indirect tax falls on the subjects regardless of their wealth, income level or assets.

This could, in theory, place it on a liberal or conservative line of fiscal policy as a commitment to indirect taxes, compared to the importance in environmental taxation that more progressive or leftist policies sometimes seem to want to adopt;

The Spanish Constitutional Court has recognized that the determination of taxes of a non-financial nature must first be carried out in accordance with the requirements and principles directly derived from Article 31 of the Constitution (the legal basis of STC 37/1987 of 26 March, FJ 4 of STC 186/1993 of 13 and 7 June).

Based on this, Environmental taxes cannot be alien to the substantive principles of tax justice. Something parallel can be said in the evaluations within the discipline of the European Union, no matter how non-taxed their aims are stipulated in the said article 31 (generality, economic capacity, equality, progressiveness and non-confiscation).

A liter of gasoline supports the same taxes whether the poor or the rich consume it., Whether consumed by a resident of a big city or a mountain town. Thus, in the electoral dialectic of taxes, the environmental issue applies more to the left than to the right, in a reality that is not always well explained to the citizen and is far from common sense when considering the current situation in Spain.