A number of the suggestions for getting government finances back on track have been dismissed by parties across the political spectrum, with healthcare reform recommendations coming in for the most criticism.

Twenty civil servant working parties presented their suggestions for increasing taxes and reducing spending on Thursday.
All parties protest that the suggested increase in the own risk element from €165 to €775 is too high, writes the NRC. The hike would net the government €4bn.
Labour’s Mariette Hamer said the premium would be ‘far too much’ for people on low incomes while VVD’s Frans Weekers said a rise of ‘between three and four hundred euro’ would be acceptable for his party.
Socialist Party leader Emile Roemer fears an ‘American style health care system’ is on the way, scaring the ill, students and the out of work ‘half to death’.
New territory
The bulk of the money will have to come from cuts in health care, unemployment benefit, mortgage tax relief, pensions and education, which are hardly unchartered territory, the Volkskrant says in its analysis.
The paper points out that former finance minister Wouter Bos’s brief for the civil servants was a ‘complete redesign’of the country instead of a cheese cutter version of slice by slice spending cuts.
Some of the proposals are taboo breakers, the paper says. These include the plan to only maintain a few main waterways – a move, according to transport organisation EVO, that will severely damage the Dutch economy.
No police help for people who are burgled but failed to lock their doors is another, the Volkskrant states.
Consensus
The Dagblad van het Noorden writes in an analysis that the most important proposal is a change in worker-employer relations.
The present system for firing people favours those on permanent contracts and redundancy pay is often very high and does not contribute to finding a new job. A change is long overdue, the paper says.
In an editorial Trouw writes that the reports were ‘the easy part’. Cries of ‘scrap those leftist hobbies’or ‘let the rich pay’are not helpful, the paper says. The proposed cuts will hurt both left and right and it is up to the politicians to make choices and create consensus.

Defence
‘€2.1bn off the defence budget? You might as well go the whole hog and scrap the entire department,.’ the AD quotes Jan Kleian, chairman of defence personnel union Acom as saying in reaction to Thursday’s proposed cuts.
The suggestions put forward by the government working party looking into ways of saving €35bn will mean 23.500 people lose their jobs, Kleian points out.
In the same paper economist Sweder van Wijnbergen sides with Kleian: these ad hoc proposals may afford temporary relief but ‘it is the most stupid way of going about things: they do maximum damage to the economy with the minimum of structural profit in the long term’, he says.
Long term solutions lie in a hike in retirement age and tax on house ownership, according to the economist.

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