The Hague-the next cabinet must save 17 billion euros a year in the long term to ensure that our country is financially ready for new tough economic times. This is stated in an opinion of officials, who also cordially inform the successors of Cabinet Rutte IV not to solve all problems with bags of money.
According to the officials, 17 billion euros per year must eventually be found from 2028 to get the household book back in order. That is, to ensure that the budget deficit is at most 2 percent of the size of the economy, and in the end even lower. In the coming years, the deficit will rise above 3 percent, the maximum according to European rules.
Whether saving should be done through cuts or higher taxes, leave the advice in the middle. That is up to politics, writes the so-called Study Group budgetary space. It meets in the run-up to every parliamentary election to provide the upcoming cabinet with financial advice.
Political differences
One of the advice is not to repeat what this current cabinet in particular intended: to spend a lot of money to bridge political differences. “In the past Cabinet period, insufficiently sharp choices have been made and it has been chosen to solve social challenges mostly with extra money,” the officials say. “Not all social challenges can and need to be solved with additional government spending.”
For example, the study group points to the high level of under-exhaustion: money that the government does not spend, for example due to the tight labor market: “the ambitions are greater than the implementation capacity, with the risk that the chosen policy goals will not be achieved and promises will not be fulfilled.”
The funds that the current cabinet has set up for the climate and nitrogen problems can also count on criticism from the officials between the rules. According to them, budgetary funds can be a useful means, but there are also many disadvantages in them. For example, because money can be carried forward to future years without limit. As a result, ” the incentive to submit realistic budgets decreases.” As far as the study group is concerned, ’it is preferable to spend where possible through regular budgets, and only use funds when this is of clear added value’.
The concerns in the budget are with the civil servants, among other things, in the costs for care, aging and climate(policy). These expenditures ” displace other expenditures without additional policies or lead to higher taxes.” For example, the government will spend almost 10 billion euros more on the AOW in five years, because more and more people are allowed to retire and the AOW age will not increase in the coming years.
The Telegraaf
