“I advise Ms. Ahtsioglou to read more carefully the Budget submitted today, so that there can be a substantive debate in Parliament on the course of the economy and public finances,” he said in a statement to the head of the Finance Department of the K.O. of SYRIZA, Efi Ahtsioglou, the Deputy Minister of Finance, Thodoros Skylakakis.
If he had read the Budget more carefully, he would have found that:
– Public spending on health is increased in 2022, both compared to 2021 and 2019, when the last budget of SYRIZA was executed. They reach a total level of general government in 2022 at 6.3% of GDP (Table 2.2). Regular expenditure for the Ministry of Health, excluding COVID emergency expenditure, amounts to € 4.52 billion in 2022 compared to € 4.27 billion in 2021, an increase of € 250 million. For 2021, COVID expenditures were made by the Ministry of Health, in addition to the above, 944 million euros, while for 2022 Covid appropriations for Health have been provided 736 million euros. Therefore, total expenditure is expected to reach 5,257 million euros in 2022, compared to 5,217 million euros in 2021, increased by 40 million euros. Revenues of hospitals, on a budgetary basis, amount to 2,689 million euros in 2022, compared to 2,675 million euros in 2021, without the additional health appropriations provided for in the special reserve.
– Regular social expenditure, excluding Covid exceptional expenditure, which was linked to successive lock downs, is also increased in 2022. According to the social budget, the expenditure of Social Security Institutions increases by EUR 759 million, from 43, 29 billion euros in 2021, to 44.05 billion euros in 2022, while OPEC regular expenses (excluding Covid expenses – “BRIDGE” program), increase by 155 million euros.
– Measures to protect households from price increases have already been taken (tax cuts, emergency assistance to beneficiaries of the minimum guaranteed income, aid to households and businesses for electricity bills, doubling of the heating allowance, etc.) and the government will continue to receives them depending on the evolution of the phenomenon.
– Tax revenues are increasing due to the dynamic recovery included in the macroeconomic scenario. I would like to remind you that, based on basic economics, when GDP increases, indirect taxes increase first, and with a time lag, direct taxes increase.
Finally, the indirect prompting of Ms. Ahtsioglu to spend another 12 billion euros in 2022 for support measures, similar to those received by the government during a period of months of lock down, in a year when the economy is expected to function normally, can mean two things. Either that it has no awareness of the country’s fiscal reality and proposes that we addict the economy to huge deficits and lead to another memorandum, or that its ideological view, according to which “normalcy is never an opportunity for the left” “pushes it to predict that 2022 will be a new year of pandemic for the Greek economy and not a year of return to normalcy, as predicted by all international organizations.”
SOURCE: AMPE
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Source From: Capital
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