When you have no desire to take measures against speculators, against those who inflate prices, you dedicate yourself to launching smoke screens to confuse people by playing fiscal makeup, playing with our money, to forgive taxes to those who abuse.
You don't have to be too sharp to realize that cutting taxes even further for landlords, for those who live off renting out their homes, is not the way to lower the exorbitant price of housing. What the Socialist Party intends to do, what the Ministry of Housing and the Ministry of Finance are negotiating, is nothing more than another measure to confuse us and make us believe that the Socialist Party truly has the will to do something to resolve the housing emergency we are going through in Spain.
They still intend to cut income tax further for the wealthy.
This makes no sense. It is not necessary to make any new gift to those who do not apply increases after the mandatory extensions of five or seven years established by the Urban Leases Law in housing rentals.
It is not necessary because the measure to guarantee that the increases are not applied is a legal change, a change that obliges to maintain the prices as they are without increases, whether it is the same or another tenant who ends up living in the dwelling. It can be done, it was done during the pandemic and it can be repeated now. In fact, justice has confirmed it. There is no illegality in carrying out that measure, especially taking into account the emergency situation we have been going through for many, many years.
It is an authentic insult to intelligence that the leaks to the press about what Housing and Treasury are plotting attempt to sell as penalties the fact of not applying tax gifts to those who continue to apply increases in housing. It would be good for the Socialist Party to pay attention to the figures, to empirical data, to data that is absolutely irrefutable.
In the last five years, rents have risen by an average of around 40%. As if they weren't expensive enough during the pandemic, now they are much more so. And the same old story doesn't cut it for us, the one that the Socialist Party is tied hand and foot and can do nothing to improve housing policies because it is the autonomous communities and the city councils that can guarantee the application of rent price caps.
The Government of Spain can do many more things. More measures can be carried out to defend the constitutional right to housing. What happens is that to do so, one must bother those who earn the most a little, especially banks, vulture funds, real estate companies, and those who own a large number of properties.
Measures must be taken to guarantee the constitutional right to access decent housing and, above all, to intervene in prices in a market governed by speculation.