Wendelin Bitzan

In my opinion, the current debate over turnover tax exemptions for music education somewhat lacks cultural-political vision. From the perspective of funding bodies and service providers, there are legitimate concerns about tax liability of educational services that do not serve a public benefit or a purpose of vocational training, as this would inevitably cause a cost increase at the expense of the final customers—who should actually profit from the funding—and thus a lack of equal opportunities. A full alignment of German tax legislation with the EU directives, which demand overall turnover tax exemptions for all educational services, is necessary to ensure that music lessons are affordable for all social classes and to avoid competitive distortion at the expense of private service providers (see the statement of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Selbstständigenverbände). On this occasion I am sharing the corresponding petition again, encouraging everybody to take notice and sign.

However, this claim does not go far enough: In order to achieve a nationwide and sustainable basic education in music, regardless of the families’ income and social status, not only tax incentives are needed, but also an increase in municipal and state funding. Any qualified extracurricular music education serves a purpose of social welfare and needs to be equipped with a negative tax, as it were, in the form of public subsidies, irrespective of the services being offered in communal responsibility, by private institutions, or by freelancers. Besides a general turnover tax exemption for all institutional and legal forms of music education, the following funding models are required, as claimed by the Bundesverband der Freien Musikschulen: a top-up for public education vouchers, and a full tax deductibility of the fees for music lessons. If the public authorities subsidised the customers’ costs with 50 % in general, it might be possible to decouple the charges from the income of teachers and operating expences of the service providers, and there would be no need to play off the interests of providers and customers against each other anymore. Fair payment of teachers would be justifiable without the risk of accusations of making music education too expensive. On the side of budgetary politics, such a subsidisation would mean a shift of the tax burden from educational institutions to the topsellers and profit-oriented companies in music business, obliging them to increase their contribution to funding basic education in music.