The PSOE wants to start the study to calculate how many improper expenses Social Security has assumed and what, therefore, have deteriorated the financial situation and the assessment of the viability of the public pension system.
This study is part of the recommendations of the new Toledo Pact approved by Congress last year. Specifically, the Toledo Pact requested a study to reflect the extent to which social security contributions assumed the burden of financing other State policies over the years , so that “citizens have a reliable image of the Social Security situation. “.
Now, through a non-law proposal registered in Congress, and collected by Europa Press , the PSOE calls for this study to be carried out, through the General Intervention of Social Security, to later submit it to the evaluation of the Court of Accounts and sent to the Committee for the monitoring and evaluation of the Toledo Pact.
Recommendation of the Toledo Pact
And it is that since the majority formation in the Chamber they emphasize the need for citizens to know how Social Security has worked throughout its history and what its resources have been allocated, as the “backbone of the welfare system.”
In its latest renewal of recommendations, the Toledo Pact Commission agreed to vindicate the role of Social Security as a pillar of the Welfare State , but also to show how its resources, the contributions paid by workers and employers, had financed much more than pensions and rest of contributory benefits.
In this way, the fact that Social Security had paid for policies of a nature outside the system “would largely explain the currently existing deficit” , as emphasized by the first of the new recommendations, aimed at consolidating the separation of sources and restoring financial balance. .
Without improper spending, there would have been no ‘red numbers’
It states that, had it been limited to financing contributory benefits, the system would not have entered a deficit and would not have been encouraged, underlines the recommendation, “a false intergenerational conflict that hides that, for years, the surpluses of the system were used to pay for other social policies and the development of the Welfare State system itself “.
All this, the Pact abounds, ” has generated a distorted image of imbalance in the system , generating alarmism and uncertainty for pensioners and the population as a whole.” Moreover, given the mismatch in the accounts, the State itself granted loans to Social Security, feeding this image of necessity, when the system’s reserves, it is pointed out, would have been enough to finance tax benefits.
Among the improper expenses that had to be financed by Budgets, the Toledo Pact indicates the reduction of contributions , welfare benefits, aid to specific productive sectors, social policies or aid for birth and childcare, as well as pension supplements .
Budgets start to pay their bill
Through this diagnosis, the Government’s plan is to gradually discharge these costs from the Budgets – for those of 2021, 13,929 million euros were transferred and the Treasury plans to raise this bill to 18,396 million in those of 2022– and thus have, as mandated by the Toledo Pact, “an accurate image of the Social Security situation . “
The recommendation itself, which the PSOE cites in its initiative, believes that this discharge of improper expenses “will contribute decisively to reduce the alarm that financial difficulties have generated and, in the long term, to reinforce their sustainability.”