Donald Tusk outlined priorities for the Polish government for the next months. In his expose, he paid a lot of attention to entrepreneurs, promising to limit inspections of micro-entrepreneurs, introduce a cash-based personal income tax for entrepreneurs settling this tax with the tax authorities, and a vacation for entrepreneurs, i.e. one month a year free of social security contributions and a benefit of half the minimum wage.
Parliamentary elections in 2023 led to major political changes in Poland. With the elections, the Law and Justice party combined a referendum – but the questions were biased and the party wanted to improve its electoral result in this way. It was parliamentary elections that were to decide Poland’s future – not a referendum.
One of the most important female politicians of the 20th century. Britain’s first female prime minister, who initiated liberal economic changes and led the country through turbulent times of transition. The fascinating story of Margaret Thatcher’s life in a 3-volume authorized biography is now available in Polish version, published with the support of the Economic Freedom Foundation.
The gluttony of the holidays marks not only the end of your capacity to feast more but also the end of the year. Your stocks I am sure are full of presents, and you want to catch up with your reading list. Lest you are too efficient and devour all your books here are a couple of recommendations for the next year.
Europe woke up in a different reality on February 24, 2022. Shocked, angered, frightened, stressed, outraged – we can probably find many words to describe the primal and visceral feelings of people. But there was one very clear-cut line: whether or not one supported Ukraine which fell victim to the barbaric and criminal Russian invasion. This was a turning point for many things, including shifting identities for many Latvian Russian-speakers.
Poland pledged to adopt the Euro when it joined the European Union in 2004. The adoption of the common currency will have a significant impact on the country’s future and will define our position in Europe. It should be noted that entry into the Eurozone is not only an economic issue but also a major political and social change.
At the end of last week, the current proposal for changing the minimum wage level was published. It is interesting for several reasons, mainly because, for the first time, the new mechanism for determining the minimum wage is applied, linking it to the dynamics of the average wage. This, in the context of high inflation and the subsequent rapid growth of wages, leads to its largest nominal increase in the last two decades.
Slovakia’s new government has finally succumbed to the Sweet Tax Temptation, as we called it in our last publication. The Ministry of Finance has published a preliminary announcement describing its intention to introduce the tax. You read that right; it is not the Ministry of Health that is in charge of the health of the population and the sustainability of health spending.
Imagine you are running a business. You have a small business or a trade, and you are doing just enough to maintain the same standard of living across challenging times. Then suddenly, without any increase in your income compared to the prices around you, the state tells you that you are already earning enough to pay more in taxes.
A new movement called degrowth is being mentioned more and more often in the media around the world. The aim of this movement is to address current environmental challenges by abandoning the ‘economic growth paradigm.’ However, life and humanity as we know it today exist only because of economic growth. We would not be dealing with the environment today without years, decades, and centuries of economic growth.
