This Thursday morning the Government carried out the public hearing to legally validate the massive removal of subsidies to families, better allocate state aid and reduce the fiscal deficit.
Among the presentations of various officials and official advisors, Martin Vauthier, who works side by side with the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, compared the country’s spending on subsidies for electricity, gas and cylinder tariffs with that funds intended for universal child allowance (AUH). Thus, it emerged that in 2023, while energy subsidies reached 1.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), the AUH program received only 0.4%.
Going back, the same thing has happened since at least 2019, and State expenditure to help millions of families has always been higher than that for the most vulnerable people.
This is one of the reasons why The government wants to severely limit the conditions for accessing state subsidies and will cross-reference multiple income and wealth databases, leaving out those who they bought dollars or other foreign currency in the last 3 months, to which They traveled abroad (non-neighboring countries) in the last 5 years, those who use prepaid not linked to the employment relationship and those who own, among other exclusion criteria, a car or motorbike less than 5 years old.
The idea of Javier Milei’s team is to establish themselves one-off fees which reflect the costs of supplying the electricity and natural gas system through the networks and concessions a direct transfer or discounts to users identified as vulnerable.
“The demand subsidy scheme allows us to rationalize consumption, with significant savings for the country, and to concentrate transfers on those who need them most. This adds to the strengthening of social programs without intermediaries“Vauthier said.
“In a context of scarce resources, subsidies for non-residential demand are eliminated, as in production processes, given that in this case it is not possible to guarantee that the real beneficiaries are the low-income sectors”, commented the advisor of the Ministry of Economy.
Source: Clarin
