PSD president Luís Montenegro said this Friday that “it is better for the country to grow more than to grow less”, but underlined that Portugal should grow twice as much as it grew.
“We had to grow today twice as much as we are growing (…). I will say that, but the country must be able to generate more wealth, create more investment and more conditions for companies to grow. competitive” , he said in statements on the sidelines of the opening session of the Youth Congress of the European People’s Party.
On this day, the Bank of Portugal revised its GDP projections upwards, highlighting the better-than-expected performance in the first quarter and pointing to growth of 2.7% this year and 2.4% in 2024.
In response, the PSD leader says that what he sees is “above all a country with women and men who struggle every day to pay their bills”.
He alluded to “the cost of living which has skyrocketed over the past year and a half”, resulting in the “inability” to afford the most basic expenditures on food, energy and fuel” and health services.
“Now it is clearly better for the country to grow more than to grow less. Unfortunately, the last decade in general has been a decade of economic stagnation, a decade in which Portugal did not give what it had to do, namely because of the policies that namely in terms of financing, in a way that has never been seen before,” he added.
The PSD leader reiterated that there are conditions for reducing taxes in Portugal, immediately pointing to the IRS, for which he defended a “significant drop” to the sixth tier.
Still on the IRS, he proposed a maximum rate of 15 percent for young people up to 35 years old.
“The time has come to dare to lower taxes on labor income in the first place,” he said.
Montenegro also defended the reduction of VAT on electricity, gas and fuel and the gradual reduction of the IRC rate.
“I have already had the opportunity to say and I repeat that in 2023, as in 2022, we will have a budget surplus in Portugal, from a tax collection point of view. That is why the government raises more taxes than the many I have already estimated to collect from the growth of tax and premium revenues from the state budget,” said the leader of the PSD.
He added that on the other hand “people are suffocating, businesses are suffocating, institutions are suffocating with too much taxation”.
Source: DN
