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HomeLatest NewsChristmas dinner without help for shopping | Opinion of Fernando Pastor

Christmas dinner without help for shopping | Opinion of Fernando Pastor

Date: March 19, 2024 Time: 09:03:33

We enter the penultimate week of the year with more sorrow than glory, thinking about how to do the shopping for one of the most important dinners of the year and pending the demagogic fight between the Government and the opposition about how to better help people at certain prices. which, this year more than any other, are inflated at Christmas. At this point, and with the lamb or sea bream already ordered from our supplier on duty, we still don’t know if the best option is a check for 200 euros (more or less), which would have to be collected late through the Tax Agency, badly and never, and only for mileurista income; or there is still the possibility that, once everything has been delayed and any measure will be of little use for this week’s purchases, a serious debate will be raised about a review and lowering of VAT on basic foods, which could go be conditioned to measures of transparency in the formation of prices in the sector, which is badly needed despite the new Law on the Food Chain.

A priori, the reduction in VAT on food has a fatal problem for the socialist coalition government: it has been proposed by the large distributors in the sector and the opposition of the PP, with which, from the outset, it is rejected as the most smart thing on the table. Faced with this, we have seen extreme interventionist proposals, such as imposing a tax on large chains (which are the ones that adjust the margins the most) and even establishing a subsidized or subsidized shopping basket for the supermarket, something as unreal as it is impossible. to do in a country where the variety, richness and gastronomic quality is unparalleled in the world. Let’s not fool ourselves: it is true that we all like to eat with quality and the ability to enjoy products that are very expensive throughout the year, but it is also true that the diversity of our food production allows us to stretch the gum as long as necessary to eat good and not so expensive, if necessary. In Spain we have known how to make the post-war chicken in pepitoria a haute cuisine dish or elevate the ‘somarro’ or the ‘torreznos’ of a lifetime to the height of the ‘roast beef’.

Excuses such as that VAT is already sufficiently reduced on food are not valid because there are many basic products at the super-reduced rate of 4%. The volume that is handled in that account is a lot and all the meat and fish that is consumed in Spain has it at 10%, with a large margin of cut. The excuse that the large distribution chains are going to try it to increase their reduced margins and the discount will not reach the consumer is not valid either. It’s just the opposite: let’s limit the bonus to those food products that the big chains use to make offers to their consumers so that not only is the savings they obtained clear, but thanks to these campaigns even better alternatives can be offered. If the food chains themselves have requested it, it is because they are going to bet on it and there is plenty of talent among their sales and marketing teams to transform such a measure into something improved for the consumer.

The option of giving a check of 200 euros (or more) to the lowest income recipients, despite the injustice of where the cut-off figure is, is not a bad solution, but it is also the cheapest for the Government and in the that their technicians have to rack their brains less, whether they are those of Consumption, those of Planas in Agriculture, those of Yolanda Díaz because they passed through there, or the Minister of Finance herself, who in the end is the one who has the checking account at her name to defray any cost. It is unfortunate that, in the midst of the crisis and with food inflation hitting us like hell, it is still not clear to us in this coalition government who is really responsible for that area. It has not even been considered making a crisis committee between technicians from various departments who know what they are talking about, to try to clarify the demagogy of their ‘bosses’. And the fact that VAT is not progressive and any reduction is the same for rich and poor, is not an exact science in this case either, where different VAT rates can be established by food groups, even by product category.

Waiting to see with what measure they surprise us this week to alleviate the rise in food, and to what extent it is effective or simply opportunistic, to continue in that line later if between ministries they manage to agree on who runs the show , it would be very good to think that a VAT reduction or a new categorization of subsidized products can serve to establish conditions of transparency in the food chain in many productions that, despite the new law that has been approved, we have never known how their products are formed. beautiful. If we live a life without knowing who sets the price for the chicken or the rabbit, and there are still payments to producers below costs even in campaigns as notorious as the grape harvest or the olive, let’s take advantage of any opportunity to give transparency to the sector. But of course, I don’t know if that would give more votes than a check.

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Puck Henry
Puck Henry
Puck Henry is an editor for ePrimefeed covering all types of news.
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