Targeted helplessness

How to help the population: the proposals of the "new" to the presidential message

The President’s message to the Federal Assembly this time was not about missiles, and this was specially indicated in the first words of Putin. He proposed the conversation about internal affairs - about social policy and popular life. In the final part of the speech, the missiles still appeared, but, if I can say, in a few reactive vein. Firstly, Putin argued that the superior warfare announced last year, over which many ironicized, in perfect order, and in the spring some characters in the cartoons of the Ministry of Defense will be sent for testing. Secondly, the president emphasized that all our latest military preparations are nothing more than an answer to the US policy, and if our Western partners listened more to the Kremlin’s opinion, maybe the superweapon would have remained with rendering.

Compared to last year’s speech, priorities have changed to opposite ones, now rockets are a seasoning to social policy and the need to “save the people”. Such a change in rhetoric attracted the attention of analysts, among which Tina Kandelaki especially stood out. In the TV presenter post, what was happening was analyzed as “changing the course from militarism to National Socialism”, but then Kandelaki recovered and explained what socialism had in mind.

For about a year, we have noticed that the rhetoric of greatness and television talk shows “About Ukraine” no longer touch people and that citizens are much more concerned about the state of their bank cards. Now this is recognized by the authorities, and “demilitarization” was carried out as the Kremlin PR action. The president, along with the people, worries about a decent life, and the fate of the “US satellites”, who “gently whip”, has faded into the background. There is no more Russian world or the highest geopolitical necessity.

But socialism at the level of slogans is really enough. In Putin’s speech about the support of citizens there were three rhetorical lines. Firstly, the president noticed that although the number of poor decreased from 40 million people in 2000 to 19 million people in 2018, there are still too many of them.

In his words, it is necessary to fight poverty in order to solve a demographic problem. And this, it seems, is Putin's first frontal appeal to poverty in recent years.

Experts are already commenting on this design in the spirit that the question of what is considered poverty rests on what statistics you use and where you conduct the upper cut line. Perhaps there are much more poor in the country. Such a "change of optics" nullifies all the development of the country in twenty years. In the papers of Rosstat, all this, however, is not reflected in any way.

On the other hand, the state has no effective ways to control the unofficial employment of citizens. And from here a serious problem arises with the second rhetorical line of Putin. It concerns the urgent role of the state: to support those who especially need it, in particular, large families, debtors who have fallen in a difficult life situation, mortgages. It was the listing of targeted social assistance measures this time that became the “strike element of the message”, which, of course, is much better than missiles.

The scale of such assistance remains limited, dramatically, the situation with poverty has not to be solved by credit holidays, but if only there was no war.

The problem is that for the implementation of socialist slogans an effective modern bureaucracy is needed, which really knows who needs help. There is no need to say what is happening with targeted help when officials are corrupt.

Finally, the third line, to which the president returned several times, is due to the fact that the state has accumulated giant financial capabilities, simply put - trillions of free money. This is contrary to the famous Maksima Prime Minister Medvedev that there was no money, but Putin explained that the funds were consolidated earlier, and now this process is more or less completed. And he hinted that now it's time to think about how to spend this money with benefit. It looked like a promise of new subsidies for hungry, but for some reason it seems that they lied first of all the most well-fed.

Indeed, a record surplus budget against the background of low public debt means that the state evades the logic of annual savings and information and expenses. Now it can reason as a free investor. It is especially convenient to do this under the conditions when the number of secret articles of the budget increases, that is, to report on a waste of money, in fact, not to anyone. And if it does not burn out with targeted assistance, then the state will master the means within the framework of some megaproject of the century like the flight of the head of Roscosmos Rogozin to the Moon. But you can focus all attention on future state expenses only if we are ready to forget, which preceded the current surplus of the treasury.

In 2018, a pension reform was carried out, which all independent experts appreciated as a direct withdrawal of money from the population, and the score goes on hundreds of thousands of rubles from each potential pensioner. At the same time, taxes were increased with this rejection of social obligations, including one of the critically important for the development of the economy - VAT. Inflation leaps are combined with non -decreasing pressure on business - both fiscal and power (the president again said about the need to protect businessmen, but these instructions have not been carried out for decades).

As we recently explained in detail, in Russia de facto giant income taxes made out as “social contributions” from the employer.

In fact, each of us gives more than half of the officially earned money.

Along with the fall of oil prices and the beginning of sanctions from Western countries among Russian lawmakers and officials, this competition was opened for new measures to draw out money from citizens, everything was used - from new excise taxes to fiscal hunting for self -employed.

And now the state dragged enough money to the budget to think about targeted social support for the poor. But if poverty is a real problem, then maybe you should not be limited to social help?

If the state is seriously intending to defeat poverty, then you should not play a very large charity fund, the money in which citizens were forcibly “transferred”. You can simply reduce the tax burden on people and companies, which will allow you to reduce higher salaries without any state participation of the state without any participation of the state, they will be able to spend more.

But this scenario, it seems, is not very consistent with state policy.

Which consists in assigning everything to yourself, consolidating not only money, but also power, and only then distribute accumulated as necessary.

So an honest conversation about poverty would have begun by the state will suspend pension reform, cancel the latest tax increase and refuse a surplus budget. Moreover, all this will happen during the open public discussion, it is scary to say, in parliament. In this situation, the state will not need to act as a philanthropist in relation to its own formal employer - voters.

But - and this is the most important thesis of the message of the president of 2019 - the country does not need any serious changes or reforms. In the political system, in the courts, in relations with state corporations in Russia, everything is excellent. It is only necessary to tighten social assistance a little and conclude a “social contract” with citizens.

It is noteworthy that this last term from the message, the meanings of which no one really understood, is an accurate tracing paper from the French term “public agreement”. Such a version of his citizens of Russia is offered for the coming years: together with the state, it is pointarily to fight the egregious cases of poverty, agreeing with everything else.