2023-07-14 17:27:29
Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) enriches the debate about the future of spouse splitting with a variant. He brings into play an abolition of this form of taxation for jointly assessed couples, limited to very high incomes – at least in the future. At the same time, the Chancellor referred to the coalition agreement, which does not provide for such a reform. According to this, only the advance tax deduction should be reorganized using the wage tax classes. But the chancellor also warned against expectations that were too high: “But that’s only possible if we make progress with modern technology.”
Earlier this week, SPD co-chairman Lars Klingbeil proposed the abolition of splitting for new marriages. Most citizens should not feel affected, the chancellor assured on Friday at his summer press conference.
“In fact, the proposals that have been made by various organizations and institutions in recent years are always about those who earn many hundreds of thousands of euros a year,” emphasized the SPD politician.
How quickly does the tax software catch up?
The federal states are responsible for the tax administration and can hardly keep up with the foreseeable adjustment of the tax programs. An intriguing question should therefore be how long it takes them to write the programs that would be a prerequisite for the planned abolition of the wage tax class combination III and V, which is popular among married couples. With this, the advance payments can be reduced – in the short term at the expense of the lower-earning spouse.
But with the so-called factor method, you can already distribute the splitting advantage according to the respective share of the joint income. The choice of tax class has no influence on the tax assessment, i.e. what ultimately has to be paid to the tax authorities after an assessment.
With splitting, half of the entire income is assigned to each spouse, which in a progressive tax rate with an allowance always leads to a relief compared to individual taxation if one earns a lot and the other earns little or even nothing. If both incomes are the same, this splitting effect is zero.
A comment by Mona Jaeger Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 13 Eckart Lohse and Markus Wehner, Berlin Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 10 Andreas Nefzger Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 7
It can be determined with the help of the income tax calculator on the website of the Federal Ministry of Finance: A married couple without children with a taxable income of 80,000 euros will pay 15,656 euros in income tax this year. Without splitting, the burden would only be the same if both contributed 40,000 euros.
According to the official calculator, the tax burden for a sole earner of EUR 80,000 would rise to EUR 24,351. That would be 8695 euros more than today. Since the non-earning partner has to be taken care of by the other, a basic allowance would certainly also have to be taken into account for him. This then led to a tax burden of almost 19,224 euros – that would still be almost 3570 euros more than under current law.
For a top-earning couple with 600,000 euros, which Scholz may be thinking of, it looks like this: 246,220 euros today for the tax authorities (including solos), without splitting 265,535 euros. This is how you get the maximum difference of 19,315 euros. With the transfer of the basic allowance, the splitting advantage would be a good 5000 euros less.
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