It is not uncommon but common enough, in the Kirchner administration’s zigzag course, that a front-line official badly disqualifies a measure and just fifteen days later announces with great pride that he will apply the same measure. said bluntly, You will do something you don’t believe in.
No riddle, it’s sung like this we are talking about Sergio Massa and the freezing of prices, that is none other than the Minister of Economy and the the most urgent economic and social problem facing the country.
In mid-October Massa compared freezing to “stepping on a pipe: the water slows down for a while, he said, but it’s still there.” He sounded like music in the ears of some entrepreneurs and a message to the financial market, because Cristina Kirchner, who intramuros promoted the sending of a list of so-called essential products to the freezer, had been planted.
It also happened when the vice president publicly asked for “a more precise and effective intervention policy in the food sector”. Perhaps to stop a sinking noise or because the vice thought the burden had already been lifted, it stopped there.
There was, in fact, a trial period for Massa’s ideas, no improvement in results and, in the end, due obedience without question and deviate. Facts and not history.
Racing in his race against time, the minister announced that “86% of mass consumer products will remain motionless” for 120 days, that there will be fines of up to $ 240 million for offenders, plus a request to businesses to reject increases of more than 4% per month at unregulated prices and an application that will channel consumer complaints.
It will be a frost then, as it is called, delineated by pressure on businessmen and with a detail that bears the stamp of Axel Kicillof and emphasizes that the governor of Buenos Aires inspires everything Cristina asks of Massa on this front.
The detail, which is much more than a detail, lifts open an investigation into irregularities and inflated costs between economic groups that weigh heavily in the formation of prices.
And what is the seal of Kicillof? That this research draws a precedent stuck in the midst of the 2015 economic crisis, when Cristina K and Axel K defined that the tighten with airs of social justice it was to be a central element of pricing policy and a powerful strength.
So, 7 years ago, companies had to send their monthly budgets, plans and cost structures to Economy, something very similar to asking them to show unknown officials and eventually competitor’s confidential information, in more of a secret sense. .
And what was the business response? draw the data and filling the ministry offices with thousands of spreadsheets populated with figures impossible to analyze, almost useless. In the second round Kicillof has already thrown in the towel and the sheets were going to the bin.
More than this half-Kafkaesque world is that Massa’s number 2, Gabriel Rubinstein, doesn’t even believe in freezing prices and, often, that’s how we would have Minister and Deputy Minister of Economy by applying a formula that they criticize. All good K and none of the parts that clash with the whole, the vice president would say.
There is a fact that is always present in these two long years of Christian government: no other anti-inflationary policy was used other than controlsfreezes, bans, stocks, some suspicious agreements and some of the same kind.
So it was from one end to the other, as if there were no other strategies, which proved to be more effective only even more elaborate, complex and laborious. From what appears to the eye, these alternatives either do not appear in Kicillof’s manual or Kicillof prefers to go with the straightforward, simple and supposedly fast-acting ones.
Put in the INDEC numbers, what is seen in sight reveals that, despite the endless list of remedies that have been tried, the average inflation sings of 236% from January 2020 to September 2022. If the measure is the cost of food, the great concern that Cristina proclaims, we have 266%.
Predictable and equally strong, the figures are almost repeated when one looks at the cost of the basic food basket, which measures poverty, and the total basic food basket, which sets the poverty line. They show increases of 264 and 229% respectively.
It should be definitively clear, even if in reality the roles cross and change, that in these 33 months the president has been Alberto Fernández, the deputy Cristina Kirchner and Sergio Massa, the head of the Chamber of Deputies. And that too the responsibility of leading the government excludes the possibility of distinguishing oneself happily and to avoid the part of the package that you have.
For the same reason, the political costs generated by the violent but unequal fall in real wages and the loss of the purchasing power of labor income, which appear on the opposite side of the inflationary escalation, are taken into account.
According to calculations by specialists, in the period from November 2017, the last ceiling of the series, to July 2022, the average salary of registered workers, that is, equal and protected by social security, fell by 20.7%. And that of those who have no social coverage, are in black and do not know the benefits of equality, has collapsed by 39%.
Even when it comes to guilt shared with macrismit is still true that labor income is accumulating in national and popular government three full years less and, above all, those that barely touch the vulnerable sectors.
Recent tax data add to the picture that the Food Card is losing 19% of its value; that, without extraordinary bonuses, let’s say that ordinary pensions fall by almost 5 percentage points compared to inflation and that the child allowance has fallen by 13.5%. Direct adjustment and all together, such as the 10.6% cut in state investments.
Other fiscal records for 2022, only in reverse, report that spending on wages grows by 10.5% in real terms, discounting inflation, and that the funds consumed in the now busted plan for Empower Work also run at 38% in real terms.
Energy subsidies, that is the battle that is coming, still mark an increase of 4.3% and an expenditure that is around one billion pesos. Other numbers will be discussed shortly, when the impact of electricity increases in the metropolitan area composed of the Federal Capital and the Conurbano will appear. In some sectors they will reach 89%.
There is talk of the quality of the Government that, faced with such a situation, the President and the Vice President have stopped communicating and, moreover, that the Deputy is fighting for an extraordinary bonus for workers in a UOM act, in as if it were another world. In addition, that the Minister of Social Development crosses the motor home Minister of the Interior and thus contributes to the intern triggered by the cancellation-non-cancellation of the PASO.
And if everything happens on the verge of an announced freeze, with 100% inflation and a displaced price structure, it would be a miracle to stop the rain of preventive considerations. These are miracles, but in the event that the parastatal YPF has already advanced with increases of gasoline and diesel ranging from 6 to 8%.
Source: Clarin
