LISBON: Each Portuguese household chipped in with €1,415 more IRS in 2014 than in 2012, according to a study presented by the Secretary General of the CGTP trade union confederation, Arménio Carlos.
Carlos said the report focused on the inequalities and impoverishment of Portuguese and had concluded that over the aforementioned period income tax had risen 42 percent, “with households paying in an extra €3.4 billion.” The report also found that there had been a 20 percent increase in poverty in the two years between 2011 and 2013 with “over 455,000 citizens falling below the poverty line of whom 80,000 were children and young persons aged under 18.”
In 2013, “one in four” Portuguese people were classed as poor including “over 576,000 children and young people” that Carlos had said had been particularly hit by unemployment, low salaries and a reduction in the level of social transfers. In the three years through to 2014, the report stated that material deprivation had risen from 20.9 percent to 25.7 percent and a “significantly larger proportion of the Portuguese cannot meet their basic economic needs or acquire durable goods.”
Carlos said that the CGTP report indicated that the total amount of lost wages due to the cut in overtime pay and the abolition of national holidays on their own amounted to in excess of €3.8 billion. Furthermore, the report described how family benefits had been removed from 116,000 children, social integration earnings had gone for over 126,000 families with solidarity payments withdrawn from over 36,000 elderly people with over half of all those unemployed being refused unemployment payments.
In turn, Carlos recommended the “valuing of labour” with a rise in the national minimum salaries and the return of both civil service salary cuts and their 35 hour week, tax reform, higher taxes on capital and the extension of the social security safety net among other measures.
