Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 5 – Russian officials
from Dmitry Medvedev on down who say that Moscow does not have enough money to
index pensions and provide social welfare to the Russian people are simply
lying, Andrey Illarionov says. Their own data show that the Kremlin has plenty
of money for war, just not for the Russian people.
As he often does, the Moscow
economist uses Russian government statistics in this case from the finance
ministry to show that the Putin regime has enough money to pay for a massive
increase in military spending even as it pleads poverty as an excuse not to
help ordinary Russians (echo.msk.ru/blog/aillar/1777124-echo/).
In an Ekho Moskvy
post entitled “No Money? Yes There Is!” Illarionov says that the Russian
government has launched a remarkably effective campaign to justify the notion
that the government doesn’t have the money to pay for welfare problems. “However,”
he says, “the Russian government has money” for what it considers more
important: war.
Moreover, it is simply not true, the
economist says, that the country’s reserve fund is running out. As of May 27th,
it amounted to 389 billion US dollars, 21 billion more than on January 1. But
that is less striking than the rise in military spending that the Russian
government openly acknowledges.
In recent year, military spending as
risen from 1.3 to 3.7 trillion rubles and now accounts for 23.8 percent of
government expenditures and 4.6 percent of Russia’s GDP. Even adjusted for
inflation and exchange rates, Russian military spending has gone up 75 percent
over a period when the Russian GDP has risen only 5.4 percent.
Put in more personal terms, the
Russian government is spending “more than 25,000 rubles” on war for every man,
woman and child in the country, an amount that if it were even partially
redirected could save most social programs, including the promised indexing of
pensions against inflation.
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