National Coalition Party opens autumn with familiar political demands

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The largest opposition party, the right-of-centre National Coalition Party, reiterated its long-standing calls for tax cuts, lower costs for employers in fields of low productivity, and improvements in the tax breaks for hiring domestic help.
      The calls were made in Turku at a two-day meeting of the leaders of the party itself and its Parliamentary group.
      The party leaders focused on the problems facing the welfare society, and concluded that sufficient studies have been made on the structural changes that would be needed.
      Party chairman Jyrki Katainen criticised the government for its decision to link planned tax cuts with a broad-based incomes agreement, saying that lower taxes are a necessary structural reform, regardless of the incomes agreement.
      Katainen called for a one percentage point cut in income taxes in all income groups next year regardless of whether an incomes agreement is reached, and that further cuts could be enacted in connection with such an agreement.
     
The National Coalition Party also urged the government to immediately enact a programme for reducing costs of providing jobs in fields of low productivity. Such a target is also set in the government’s policy programme, but its implementation has been delayed.
      The party says that it plans to re-introduce a legislative initiative, which it put forward already last year.
      Katainen warned that if the reform is not implemented, it would constitute "a deliberate choice, under which those people, who will always exist in Finland, who do not get jobs in fields of high productivity, will have to be without work".
     
The party also wants to raise the tax deduction for home help from EUR 1,150 a year to EUR 2,300 a year, to reduce the deductible from EUR 100 to EUR 50, and to extend the scope of the deduction to services bought by the taxpayer for his or her parents or grandparents. Similar proposals have also been heard from within the government as well.
      The National Coalition Party also proposes an experiment in Kainuu, which would allow unlimited tax deductions for hiring home help.


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