The hidden face of inflation: subsidies for $ 2 billion have been swallowed up

This is a real enmityto put it mildly, what Kirchnerism managed to combine by mixing endless freezing of electricity and gas bills with a package of subsidies that, on paper and on paper only, would enact a measure designed to curb the advance of the inflationary process.

The Government thus set up a combo to come out Very expensive to the State in exchange for the unselfish result or, worse, because of the amount of money lost and the locked where he obtained himself by repeating a well-known essay.

To start with the specific data and the key objectives that give life to the transition, we already have between January 2020 and April 2022, i.e., since the current version K came to government, the tourniquet applied to the rates limited the increase in gas and electricity to a very moderate 35%. In fact at 35% almost all adjustments will be made by the beginning of 2022.

And how did the fact that it was intended to be a strong anchor against inflation affect prices, even though it was an anchor used a thousand times here? Public and intimate Freezing or near freezing did not prevent anything.

INDEC numbers are already singing in both two years and four months, ang price index climbed 135% and more than four times the increase in rates. The soothing prize, if any, is that gas and electricity at amounts close to production costs, we will have higher inflation.

Right now, we have what we have and what we have is not exactly a party. You jump in there, wonderful, the bill for energy subsidies, which, moreover, is advancing at lightning speed.

Shows the latest official figures $ 420 billion from January to April$ 267,000 million or 175% higher than the same quarter last year.

And if you go back a little further, at the beginning of the current K cycle, bill growth is said to be at least 350% between the end of 2019 and the end of 2021, that is, in just two years. Unparalleled, serving is 250 percentage points ahead of inflation itself, the 105% recorded by INDEC statistics.

The problem with data is that there will come a time when it will start to get tired, and the advantage is that sometimes, if not often in many instances, they show things better than a thousand stories. More importantly, when it comes to stories that are variations of others that are a bit tired of using.

That said, the following shows in silver how far the energy subsidy taximeter has progressed: from end to end, it already marks 1.9 billion pesos or, if you will, on the verge of two billion. In dollars at the current official exchange rate, the move would cost the state around US $ 17 billion.

It sounds strange with such a figure in sight cristinistas specialists of the Instituto Patria question any tariff adjustmenteven those who leave safely the so-called social rate that governs sectors of lower or very low income.

That is, the technician-militants of La Cámpora came to prove and defend a system that had been tried and tested unevenly and regressively.

Reports coming out of Cristina Kirchner’s second term and the times Axel Kicillof Minister of Economy also speak about this world have been reversed. They put something still standing, that is, that the layers with the most resources get 30% of the subsidies, while those at the bottom of the social pyramid get very little 10%.

Another detail of nothing changed indicates that in 2015 public accounts recorded subsidies for $ 138,000 million, another mountain of money that at the official exchange rate at the time exceeded 10,000 million dollars. Without exception to the rule, in 2014 it was $ 128 billion.

It seems that then and now the dominant Christian reasoning goes through the assumption that the money issue is free and, therefore, it may serve to maintain a previously unsustainable system and thus dribble political cost into its rectification. It is also a way of avoiding the task of thinking of a lesser imbalance and of removing possible disturbances in reaching out to the government without the task being completed.

But even with pure fraud that broadcasting is free, some demands of reality strongly cross over and leave the energy system shrinking, continuing to stand as if it were a huge construction. Understandably, what we are talking about is the real reality and not what some officials think or invent and present as true.

An example emerges, cleanly, when comparing the $ 420,000 million the Government spent on indiscriminate subsidies in the first quarter with the $ 201,000 million it allocated to the Empower Work program and the Food Card. You don’t have to dig too deep to find, in the official reservoir, such as regressive transfers of public resources or handling that are not clear enough.

The fact in any case is that, measured by the results, the approach of delay rates is a failure and on top of a very costly failure. Everything is on the list of failed trials and many announced failures: from regulated prices, barriers and prohibitions on exports and imports and restrictions, to the classic give and take between companies and controllers.

A famous piece of that repertoire, which was also explained during the stock market and the reservations for Kicillof’s flat, was the program. Price Care which started this season to eat field and became almost sampled.

Finally, program prices are among the thousands analyzed by INDEC to generate a monthly index. Institute of Statistics reports count how much care was taken in each survey and the same thing, which smells of self -covering of possible suspicions, shows where it has diminished.

With Roberto Feletti in the role of Secretary of Commerce set to keep prices low, in November the Cares exceeds 13% of the total price reviewed. Between the complaints of traders and the meager profits it reported, the presence of the index system declined in January and in April it marked an average of 6.23%.

Obviously: if they haven’t removed it from the map yet, it’s because it means recognizing that even the star of the controls has failed.

So, on horseback from the economic turmoil, from a fractured government that continues to sow uncertainties and from what we are pulling, they are clearly sending out comments, some twice that in a month for the same product. There is in the INDEC statistics a round and fresh sample of how the overall picture has deteriorated.

This refers to the three to four month period exhausted by the government. Initially, by 2020, inflation was said to be 9.4%; in the next one, 17.6% and finally, today, 23.1% rang out, reaching nearly 14 points ahead of the initial indicator just three years ago.

A version closer to the so -called cost of living says that between one end and the other end we have an increase of 174% in the Food and Beverage chapter.

Now, it’s the turn of inflation-indexed National Treasury bonds. A haven from the loss of the value of the peso and a very expensive method of funding the financial deficit, although the only available, the account states that an impressive $ 3.1 trillion is due by the end of the year. With interest falling every four months.

Clear again: this State demands that instead of squeezing it for anything to come, someone submit it to a serious restoration process.