Environmental tax will gradually increase the punishment of sewage discharge

The reform of fiscal and taxation system is the key to the reform in 2014. Lou Jiwei revealed that environmental taxes that need to be submitted to the NPC legislation will gradually increase the penalties for sewage discharge in the future, possibly first increasing the penalties for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.

Lou Jiwei said that environmental tax is actually a kind of tax to punish sewage discharge. The next step will also be to consider promoting carbon trading, but the premise is to ensure strict administrative enforcement and strict measurement of how much carbon enterprises emit. Only by doing so can it be possible to promote carbon trading.

Apart from environmental tax, Lou Jiwei said that for the real estate tax reform which is concerned by the society, this kind of tax also needs the legislation of the National People's Congress. Although the reform is more complicated, the legislative process will be propelled in time, and the Ministry of Finance will actively cooperate with it.

At the forum, in view of whether to levy capital gains tax, Lou Jiwei said that this needs to first reform the tax system. At present, individual taxes in China are levied separately, and only salary income is levied accumulatively. At the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee, it was made clear that tax reform should be changed from classified taxation to syndromic taxation, and personal income should be counted as taxable income. Only in this case can we consider taxing capital gains.

At the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, it was decided that the new round of financial and tax system reform would start from three aspects: improving the budget management system, improving the tax system, and establishing a system suitable for the rights and expenditure responsibilities. Lou Jiwei said that the first two clearly define specific reform tasks, and the latter involves to a greater extent the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity.

He believed that the government should deepen the reform of fiscal and taxation system in order to promote the reform of simplification and decentralization of government. In terms of dealing with the relationship between the government and the market, we should give the power to the market resolutely and give full play to the role of the market on this basis.