To equip the army: a new tax should raise 20 billion francs

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Opinions differ about how much it is and until when. One thing is clear: the Swiss army needs money. The changing security situation in Europe requires strong, defensible armies – and Switzerland has only a limited supply of them.

But because the treasury is empty – the federal government expects a structural deficit in the coming years that will run into billions – bourgeois politicians are outdoing each other with financing ideas.

The new Schwyz State Councilor Heinz Theiler (53) has started a petition to convince the Federal Council to provide the army with one percent of the gross domestic product by 2030. The state government does not want to do this until 2035. However, Theiler does not say where the money will come from.

SVP State Councilor Werner Salzmann (61) has gone even further: he proposes issuing a military bond – i.e. giving Swiss citizens or foreign investors the opportunity to invest in the military in the hope of making a nice profit . The bond would be something like a federal bond, only with a specific purpose. This already happened before the Second World War.

Center councilor Peter Hegglin (63) also went into mothballs, so to speak. He proposes that the federal government implement a military tax for a few years. There was one like this before. Introduced as a ‘war tax’ in 1916, in the midst of World War I, it was renamed a military tax in 1941.

In concrete terms, Hegglin proposes to increase VAT by one percentage point over six years – intended for the military. That would generate just over 20 billion francs in six years. This would finance the additional costs that the army will cause over the next ten years, as the “Tages-Anzeiger” reports.

So the military’s problems would be solved – and many others too? The history of the 1916 war tax shows otherwise: temporary taxes are rarely temporary. The war or military tax continued even after World War II. We still pay it today – as a direct federal tax. (sf)

Source:Blick