Measures
The plan includes a broad range of actions at national level and at EU level to help households and industrial firms (particularly automobile and construction).
The measures include:
- reflation: the Commission will allow Member States to break the Stability and Growth Pact for two or three years.
- incentives to investment: the plan outlines measures to encourage the fight against climate change and promotes strategic investments in buildings and energy efficient technologies.
- lower rates: the ECB is invited to drop its rates.
- tax rebates: lowering taxation on green technology and eco-friendly cars, accompanied by scrappage programs
- social measures: the Commission proposed the governments to temporarily increase unemployment benefits and their duration, to increase allowances to households, to lower taxes on low incomes, to lower social security contributions paid on low wages by employers, to reduce labour costs paid by employees with low incomes, to provide subsidised loans or credit guarantees for companies, to reduce temporarily the VAT rate to support consumption. The Commission announced it would adopt by mid-March 2009 a proposal to lower VAT rates for services with high labour-intensiveness (such as catering).
Read more about this topic: 2008 European Union Stimulus Plan
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“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)