The plenary session of Congress today voted in favor of the law on pension and employment plans proposed by the Government to promote worker savings and complement the contributory public pension system. Although the law closed the amendments in March, it was not until this very afternoon when the Ministry of Social Security was able to be certain that the norm was carried out in the terms in which it intends to establish this new system, which experts call second pillar.
The parliamentary process has been a real chaos. Considered a reform that is not one of the most difficult to carry out within what Social Security has planned, the pension and employment plans have become a headache for Minister José Luis Escrivá and for the deputies of the Commission of Work and Social Security.
Last week this commission led to a grotesque in which the deputies ended up admitting that they no longer knew what they were voting for and the president of the commission, Antonio Gómez Reino, apologizing while trying to get along with the lawyer. As a result and to the surprise of Escrivá, the body gave the green light to the unstopping of contributions and the cut of tax advantages in personal income tax on contributions to pension plans. The PSOE was forced to announce a separate vote to annul its own vote in committee and fix the mess in today’s plenary session.
As a last note of emotion, Isabel Franco, deputy for Podemos in Seville, announced this morning her agreement with the PSOE for “the unstopping of maximum pensions”, an announcement that has once again unleashed confusion around what would come out of the plenary Franco herself has recognized her mistake by pointing out that the agreement is to negotiate in the future the unstopping of the maximum contribution bases, something that Escrivá himself already contemplates in his strategy of reforming the pension system in stages.
The final text of the opinion, which has reached the plenary session with more than a hundred living amendments, has managed to overcome all the misunderstandings and add 172 votes in favor, 164 against and six abstentions.
support of Citizens, PNV and PDeCAT and the abstention of EH-Bildu. For their part, the PP, Vox, Esquerra Republicana, the CUP and Más País-Equo have voted against.
From now on, the initiative will continue its processing in the Upper House and will only return to Congress to endorse or revoke the changes that the Senate may introduce.
In its latest votes, Congress has reversed the cut in tax benefits in personal income tax –approved at the request of United We Can due to an error by the PSOE in the Labor Commission– as well as the unstopping of contributions.
The bill comes out of Congress with a new relief, in corporate tax so that companies can deduct from their full quota up to 10% of the contributions they make in favor of their workers with remuneration of less than 27,000 euros gross. From that figure, the deduction will be on the proportional part of the contributions that correspond to a gross remuneration of that limit.
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