The riot about the Utrecht status holders quickly died down. There was a moment of commotion, after the FD had written about a group of status holders who had been given a house and subsequently quit their job. There were only six, said Minister Karien van Gennip in the House. The alderman later adjusted it to three. Refugee work hastened to report that life is ‘complex and intensive’ for beneficiaries. Then calm was restored.
That went a little too fast. The minister also said ‘work always pays off’. I don’t know if she had processed what was in the day before de Volkskrant stood: Utrecht gives an energy allowance to people with an income of up to 150 percent on social assistance, the highest percentage in the country. And then there was the Utrecht initiative to only offer status holders social housing. That was great solidarity from the bottom up with the bottom, set up by a progressive alderman who probably lives in the more expensive neighborhood behind Biltstraat. Reason enough to quickly cover up a riot.
Work always pays, the minister said with some aplomb, while the issue now is precisely that a large number of women do not intend to work anymore because it does not pay at all. For years, allowances, levies and subsidies have been turned around, until the tax buttons went crazy. As a result, it can happen to you as an honorable member of the middle class that you earn 100 euros extra, only to have to bring 90 of that to the tax authorities. Henk Nijboer of the PvdA complained about it in the Chamber, but it was really his own party that had organized this leveling party.
Even more butter on his head was the VVD spokesperson who complained about the same and pointed to the left for the perpetrators. The VVD is expected to oppose too drastic ideas about leveling up. The party has been in power for twelve years and a former CPB director Coen Teulings said on Wednesday in The Telegraph that he cannot remember such a great leveling stroke as just now. Increasing the minimum wage by 10 percent means that the difference between wages and benefits will fall by 10 percent in one fell swoop. Working harder is no longer rewarding at a certain point, says Teulings.
I have indeed not heard from the VVD Prime Minister about the Hardworking Dutchman for a while. What about the group that just doesn’t qualify for allowances and municipal energy contributions? I spoke about it with Jos Teunissen, a law professor who is just as stubborn as he is original. Every year he sheds his critical light on the Tax Plan. He has been writing for years that the official tax rate for the middle groups is about 37 percent, but that the actual costs are much higher, sometimes reaching almost half of the gross wages. I’ll leave the technology aside, but the devil is in the coalition agreement of the VVD and PvdA at the end of 2012.
You remember the revolt of the VVD when Mark Rutte gave away in an unguarded moment that the health insurance premium would increase with the income. ‘Marx Rutte’, headlined The Telegraph. Diederik Samsom came to the rescue of the VVD leader, but of course the outcome had to remain the same. And so the tax knob was turned and instead of the health insurance premium, the so-called tax credit was made income-related. There was no protest, because no one understood. Wouter Bos, informateur and columnist of this newspaper at the time, understood it. He later wrote a cryptic column suggesting that sneaky solidarity is sometimes preferable to visible solidarity. Sometimes people are better off not knowing.
Tax decisions that are not discussed can be argued against. Jos Teunissen recalled the medieval (!) principle of ‘no taxation without representation’, for which democracy was approximately founded. The idea of sneaky solidarity also sheds surprising light on the difficulty I myself had in learning about the relative position of the middle class. The Nibud specialists at the housekeeping book could not help me. They have the income pictures of 120 family compositions there, but nothing about the ratio between income groups. In the previous director Kim Putters, the SCP had been a tireless advocate of ‘groups of vulnerable citizens who have been left behind for years and are not taken seriously’. But nothing about their relative position in terms of benefits and burdens.
Until I spoke to Stella Hoff from the same SCP, who is conducting the investigation Benefit from the government from 2017. It accurately mapped out for each income group exactly how much ‘benefit from the government’ people had. Five years later everything is different, but not that the Netherlands is a gigantic redistribution machine. Think of something, and it is paid, distributed and enjoyed according to means. From healthcare to education and from sports to culture. The transfers are huge. In general, the rich pay by far the most, but the chagrin is in the middle. There, the care burden is heavy, they lose out in terms of living, because there is no housing benefit and often no mortgage interest deduction, and neither are the special municipal funds such as in Utrecht.
On a graph you can see how steeply the profit of the government falls as soon as the hard-working Dutchman presents himself. That forgotten group, the ‘dropped out’ of René Cuperus and Josse de Voogd, was pre-eminently abandoned by the VVD. But in six months’ time you will hear the loud lamentation about the populist vote again in the elections for the provincial councils. The SCP had intended to repeat the survey into government benefits after five years. It didn’t happen.