no one likes to pay taxes. Or at least it doesn’t seduce him, but, if we accept them and choose, some are better than others. This is what concludes a study of the La Caixa Foundation based on a representative sample of the Spanish population, in which it is concluded “the greater support for higher rates for personal income tax” rather than, for example, the tax on the inheritancesthe inheritance tax. The income tax is the direct tax that collects the most, with a total of 94,500 million in 2021, and with some 20 million taxpayers. The one that falls on the inheritances, transferred to the autonomies, is paid in some yes and in others no. For example, a 30-year-old bachelor or single woman who inherits 800,000 euros from her father, of which 200,000 correspond to the habitual residence, would pay more than 103,000 euros in Asturias and nothing in Galicia, Cantabria and Andalusia.
The study, carried out by Luis Miller, from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), José A. Noguera, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB); and Leire Salazar, from the National Distance Education University (Uned), states that “citizens choose significantly higher and progressive average rates for personal income tax than for inheritance tax in all circumstances”. To carry it out, a questionnaire was distributed in March 2020 to a sample of 1,500 people representative of the Spanish population.
While for successions “in most hypothetical scenarios the chosen rate does not reach 10%, for personal income tax it exceeds 30% for hypothetical subjects with very high incomes.” In both cases, in any case, “the majority opt for higher rates than those in force in the different autonomous communities”, according to the study, whose title is ‘Inheritance tax and income tax: how much should be paid?’
The same analysis throws up other remarkable issues. When subjects are pushed in the experiment to think about their own position in the income distribution, they opt “for higher rates for both taxes.” The difference can be up to four points.
Another important aspect is that “90% of the experimental subjects are wrongly located in the income distribution”. And the fact is that “most of them place themselves in middle positions, rich they consider themselves less rich than they are and the poor less poor.” And “those who consider themselves poorer than they are support lower inheritance tax rates.”
Numerous survey-based studies reveal that “the vast majority of citizens recognize the need to pay taxes and approve of their existence as a redistributive and financing instrument for public services.” But that understanding is not the same by all citizens or for all fiscal figures.
The best example is the different social support for personal income tax and inheritance and donation tax. In fact, the one who taxes the inheritances “is facing greater social and political resistance in many countries”. All this has led “to a marked reduction in the taxation of inheritances and even their virtual disappearance in some autonomous communities,” they recall.
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And why this antipathy? Several studies justify it in the importance of certain family values ”as legitimizers of the inheritance transmission with hardly any tax burden, the perceptions of the supposed role of said taxes to promote equal opportunities or the lack of knowledge about how these taxes affect the household itself in function of their situation in the distribution of income and wealth”.
The authors conclude that one of the implications of this experiment is that “intensifying the tax culture of citizens, as well as knowledge of their situation in the income distribution, could lead to a greater willingness to pay progressive taxes.”