High Income Households Receive Largest Share of Tax Deductions RUT and ROT

Statistics Sweden / RUT and ROT

Note: all material below is taken from an article published by the Statistics Sweden, Sweden’s Statistical Central Bureau (SCB), no longer available on its website, but archived here (link).

For a summary in English, see further below:

Mest ROT-, RUT- och ränteavdrag till hushåll med höga inkomster

De svenska hushållen fick 2013 närmare 50 miljarder kronor av staten i form av ROT-, RUT- och ränteavdrag. Hushåll med hög ekonomisk standard fick betydligt större del av dessa pengar än hushåll med låg ekonomisk standard.

Hand med diskhandske och svamp

Den som anlitar någon för att renovera sitt hus eller för städning har under ett antal år fått en skattereduktion på hälften av arbetskostnaden. Denna skattereduktion kan som högst uppgå till 50 000 kronor per år. År 2013 var ROT-avdraget cirka 15 miljarder kronor och RUT-avdraget 3 miljarder kronor. Det totala avdraget för ROT och RUT motsvarade i storlek statens utgifter för bostadsbidrag och bostadstillägg.

En annan skattereduktion är ränteavdraget. Den som har ränteutgifter får av staten tillbaka 30 procent av denna utgift. Om utgiften är högre än 100 000 kronor får man 21 procent på det belopp som överstiger den gränsen. År 2013 uppgick ränteavdraget till närmare 30 miljarder kronor. Det var lika mycket som staten betalade ut i barnbidrag.

Avdragen i snitt 11 000 per hushåll

De svenska hushållen fick 2013 i genomsnitt nästan 11 000 kronor i ROT- RUT- och ränteavdrag. Avdragen fördelar sig dock ojämnt på hushållen. Hushåll med hög ekonomisk standard har väsentligt större ROT-, RUT- och ränteavdrag än hushåll med låg ekonomisk standard. Det framgår av diagrammen i denna artikel där hushållen delats in i tio lika stora grupper, så kallade deciler, där decil 1 är den tiondel av hushållen som har lägst ekonomisk standard och decil 10 är den tiondel som har högst ekonomisk standard.

Hushållen i decil 10 fick i genomsnitt nästan 30 000 kronor i ROT-, RUT- och ränteavdrag 2013 medan hushållen i decilerna 1 och 2 endast fick 2 000 kronor.

Medelbelopp för ROT-avdrag 2013 i decilerna

Medelbelopp för ROT-avdrag 2013 i decilerna

Medelbelopp för RUT-avdrag 2013 i decilerna

Medelbelopp för RUT-avdrag 2013 i decilerna

Medelbelopp för ränteavdrag 2013 i decilerna

Medelbelopp för ränteavdrag 2013 i decilerna

Så påverkar tak på eller sänkning av avdragen

Det finns förslag på att sänka skattereduktionerna för ROT och RUT. Det sammanlagda taket för ROT och RUT ska dock fortfarande vara 50 000 kronor.

När det gäller RUT finns ett förslag som innebär att det införs ett tak för RUT-avdraget på 25 000, för den som är under 65 år. Det är dock ytterst få som idag gör så stora RUT-avdrag att de påverkas av det förslaget. Statens utgifter för RUT-avdrag 2013 hade med detta tak minskat med 80 miljoner kronor.

För ROT finns ett förslag om att sänka reduktionen från 50 procent av arbetskostnaden till 30 procent. Det skulle innebära samma procentuella minskning av ROT för alla hushåll och i alla deciler. Statens utgifter för ROT-avdraget 2013 hade med denna sänkning minskat från 15 till 9 miljarder kronor.

När det gäller ränteavdraget förekommer diskussioner om att avskaffa det eller att trappa ner det, alltså att sänka den andel på 30 procent som man idag får tillbaka som skattereduktion. Detta skulle, liksom den föreslagna sänkningen av ROT, innebära att alla hushåll får samma procentuella sänkning av ränteavdraget.

Men vad skulle det innebära om man istället införde ett tak för ränteavdraget likt det tak på 50 000 kronor som finns för ROT och RUT? SCB har räknat på vad olika nivåer på tak för ränteavdraget skulle innebära för hushållen.

Ett tak på 25 000 kronor per person 2013 hade inte förändrat särskilt mycket. Det hade minskat statens utgifter från 29 miljarder till 26 miljarder och påverkat ungefär 2 procent av hushållen. Om taket hade varit 15 000 kronor skulle statens utgifter ha minskat till 20 miljarder kronor och 8 procent av hushållen skulle ha påverkats. Ett tak på 10 000 kronor skulle ha minskat utgifterna till 13 miljarder kronor och 16 procent av hushållen skulle ha berörts.

Med de låga räntor som råder på marknaden idag skulle till exempel ett par med ett gemensamt lån på 3 miljoner kronor med en ränta på 2 procent, trots sitt relativt stora lån, hamna under 10 000 kronor var.

Framför allt är det hushåll med hög ekonomisk standard som skulle påverkas av tak för ränteavdraget. I decil 10 skulle ett tak på 10 000 kronor år 2013 ha minskat det genomsnittliga ränteavdraget från nästan 15 000 kronor till knappt 4 000 kronor. I decilerna 1 och 2 hade avdraget minskat från knappt 2 000 kronor till cirka 1 000 kronor.

Medelbelopp för ränteavdrag vid olika nivåer på tak för ränteavdraget, 2013

Medelbelopp för ränteavdrag vid olika nivåer på tak för ränteavdraget, 2013

Publicerad: 2015-06-28
Nr 2015:139

Författare

Hans Heggemann

arbetar med ekonomisk väl­färds­statistik på SCB.

Johan Lindberg

arbetar med ekonomisk väl­färds­statistik på SCB.

Bonusmaterial: nyare liknande statistik i termer av kommuner, se lista efter artikel (länk)

English:

In 2013 the ROT tax deduction was about 15 billions Swedish crowns (€ 1,5 billion) and the RUT tax deduction was about 3 billion Swedish crowns (€ 300 million). The total deduction for ROT and RUT was equivalent to the state expenditure for housing allowance.

The Swedish households received an average of 11000 Swedish crowns (€ 1100) as Rot and RUT tax deductions. However, the deductions are unevenly distributed. Households with a high economical standard received substantially more than households with low economical standard. This is illustrated by the diagrams of this article, in which the households are sorted into ten equally large groups, so called deciles; decile 1 is the tenth of the households with the lowest economical standard, and decile 10 is the tenth of the households with the highest economical standard.

The households in decile 10 received an average of about 30 000 Swedish crowns (€ 3000) in 2013 for ROT and RUT deductions (including home mortgage interest deduction), whereas the households in deciles 1 nd 2 received only 2000 Swedish crowns (€ 200) .

 

A Threefold Critique of Tax Deductions RUT and ROT
(Division of Labor, Commodification, Regressive Distribution)

Rut-avdrag is a tax deduction for domestic services in Sweden. It was implemented in 2007, and has been modified continuously. Rut is an acronym for rengöring, underhåll, and tvätt (cleaning, maintenance, and washing), but it is also a Swedish version of the feminine forename Ruth.

Rot-avdrag is a tax deduction for construction services on existing, privately owned buildings in Sweden. Rot is an acronym for renovering, ombyggnad, and tillbyggnad (renovation, reconstruction, and additional construction). The tax deduction is part of a larger and older stimulation program called ROT-programmet. The Swedish word “rot” means root.

 

Regressive Distibution

Excerpt from David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (emphasis added in bold):

“The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. I have elsewhere provided an account of the main mechanisms whereby this was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes. To this list of mechanisms we may now add a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and the diminution or erasure of various forms of common property rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education and health care) won through a generation or more of class struggle. The proposal to privatize all state pension rights (pioneered in Chile under the dictatorship) is, for example, one of the cherished objectives of the Republicans in the US. Accumulation by dispossession comprises four main features:

1. Privatization and commodification. […]

2. Financialization. […]

3. The management and manipulation of crises. […]

4. State redistributions. The state, once neoliberalized, becomes a prime agent of redistributive policies, reversing the flow from upper to lower classes that had occurred during the era of embedded liberalism. It does this in the first instance through pursuit of privatization schemes and cutbacks in those state expenditures that support the social wage. Even when privatization appears to be beneficial to the lower classes, the long-term effects can be negative. At first blush, for example, Thatcher’s programme for the privatization of social housing in Britain appeared as a gift to the lower classes, whose members could now convert from rental to ownership at a relatively low cost, gain control over a valuable asset, and augment their wealth. But once the transfer was accomplished housing speculation took over, particularly in prime central locations, eventually bribing or forcing low-income populations out to the periphery in cities like London and turning erstwhile working-class housing estates into centres of intense gentrification. The loss of affordable housing in central areas produced homelessness for some and long commutes for those with low-paying service jobs. The privatization of the ejidos in Mexico during the 1990s had analogous effects upon the prospects for the Mexican peasantry, forcing many rural dwellers off the land into the cities in search of employment. The Chinese state has sanctioned the transfer of assets to a small elite to the detriment of the mass of the population and provoking violently repressed protests. Reports now indicate that as many as 350,000 families (a million people) are being displaced to make way for the urban renewal of much of old Beijing, with the same outcome as that in Britain and Mexico outlined above. In the US, revenue-strapped municipalities are now regularly using the power of eminent domain to displace low- and even moderate-income property owners living in perfectly good housing stock in order to free land for upper-income and commercial developments that will enhance the tax base (in New York State there are more than sixty current cases of this).

The neoliberal state also redistributes wealth and income through revisions in the tax code to benefit returns on investment rather than incomes and wages, promotion of regressive elements in the tax code (such as sales taxes), the imposition of user fees (now widespread in rural China), and the provision of a vast array of subsidies and tax breaks to corporations. The rate of corporate taxation in the US has steadily declined, and the Bush re-election was greeted with smiles by corporate leaders in anticipation of even further cuts in their tax obligations. The corporate welfare programmes that now exist in the US at federal, state, and local levels amount to a vast redirection of public moneys for corporate benefit (directly as in the case of subsidies to agribusiness and indirectly as in the case of the military-industrial sector), in much the same way that the mortgage interest rate tax deduction operates in the US as a subsidy to upper-income homeowners and the construction industry.The rise of surveillance and policing and, in the case of the US, incarceration of recalcitrant elements in the population indicates a more sinister turn towards intense social control. The prison-industrial complex is a thriving sector (alongside personal security services) in the US economy. In the developing countries, where opposition to accumulation by dispossession can be stronger, the role of the neoliberal state quickly assumes that of active repression even to the point of low-level warfare against oppositional movements (many of which can now conveniently be designated as ‘drug trafficking’ or ‘terrorist’ so as to garner US military assistance and support, as in Colombia). Other movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the landless peasant movement in Brazil, are contained by state power through a mix of co-optation and marginalization.

The Commodification of Everything

To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide—an ethic—for all human action. In practice, of course, every society sets some bounds on where commodification begins and ends. Where the boundaries lie is a matter of contention.”

 

Excerpt from:

David Harvey
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005/2007