Does the choice pay off for me?

When the little cross is ticked in a circle behind a party on the more or less long piece of paper in September, of course the big questions of humanity and the nation play an important role: climate protection, digitization, integration, modernization of the economy and so on - but of course orientation voters are also interested in what they will get out of it if this or that should move into the Chancellery.

Manfred Schäfers

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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It's a bit like the famous survey: Are you willing to spend more on the Sunday roast if the animals are kept in a species-appropriate and natural way beforehand? Many say that this is very important to them - and then buy the cheap goods from the discounter. In any case, before making a decision in the fall, it is a popular exercise to ask experts to work out what the election statements of the parties mean for different incomes. But this year the interested party with this wish will be rejected. What is different this time than before previous polls?

"For me, all calculations of what the election programs mean for income tax are fraught with great uncertainty and therefore make sense to a limited extent," says Frank Hechtner, holder of the chair for business taxation at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

In the past, the economist himself presented such tables, which showed the reader what the electoral success of the various parties would mean for him personally financially.

Why is it different this time?

"Deliberately kept imprecise"

"The programs for the 2021 federal election are deliberately kept inaccurate," explains the tax expert. For example, there is no indication of when the new regulation put in the shop window is planned. "It makes a difference whether relief is planned for next year, for 2023 or even later." The basic tax allowance must be regularly adjusted according to the requirements of the Federal Constitutional Court. Adaptation to the cold progression is now also taking place with a certain regularity. If the tax rate were adjusted towards the end of the legislative period, the additional relief would naturally be lower than if this happened immediately after the election.

The missing date for the prospective tax reform is not the only problem from the point of view of the earlier tax relief calculator.

"There are no precise announcements about the planned tax rate," criticizes Hechtner.

In the past one could get around in such cases by asking the people who would have calculated the tax concepts for the parties.

"If I try that today, I'll run into a wall of silence," he says.

He would have to fill in the gaps himself in order to be able to calculate anything.

But the scientist refuses.

"If I want to deliver concrete results now, although the party committees have deliberately remained vague, I will write the party's election manifesto myself - that cannot be my job."

"You can practically not calculate seriously"

Even the taxpayers' association, which also likes to create tables with foreseeable relief and burdens before elections, does not see itself in a position to derive concrete figures from the election manifestos this time. “You can practically not calculate seriously because the parties simply fail to provide the necessary details. Obviously nobody wants to commit - I'm looking forward to the coalition talks and the actual competencies of the negotiating partners, ”says Reiner Holznagel, President of the Taxpayers Association. The present calculations are not very reliable. As an example, he cites the planned abolition of tax splitting for newly concluded marriages by the Greens. That would be a noticeable additional burden. But this effect is mostly excluded from the tables at hand, criticizes the taxpayer president.

The economist Hechtner notes that the SPD and CDU have deliberately remained vague with their election programs, but that their candidates for chancellor have made additional comments afterwards. “While Armin Laschet tended to take back relief verbally, Olaf Scholz tried to put his relief plans into concrete terms,” he says. As a result, both remained vague. "From a party-political point of view, this may be a suitable tactic so that nothing has to be ruled out, but it complicates the political discussion on tax policy measures."

Regardless, the recent flood disaster, which hit households hard and damaged roads, railways, bridges and other elements of the infrastructure, has the potential to reshuffle the cards for possible tax relief. The red-green federal government postponed tax relief in 2002. At the same time, with the Flood Victims Solidarity Act, it increased the corporate tax rate for 2003 by 1.5 percentage points. According to the model, even vaguely promised relief could be collected after the federal election.