The lower class is lazy. The idea of detecting “little laborious” poor people has existed since the dawn of the system. The stereotype of the lazy “class” who doesn’t want to work and pulls subsidies is used to erode the policies of the welfare state. The idea spreads that poverty is not caused by social injustice, but by the result of personal failure. The most prominent of these symptoms is the canonization of the term poverty in its most postmodern “acceptance”: vagrancy. We know very well that the power of some ideas has little to do with the truth they contain.
The “welfare queen” – queens of the subsidy – were baptized at the time of the Reagan/Thatcher binomial by the Anglo-Saxon media to women who were too lazy to work and dedicated themselves to deceiving the system and accumulating state subsidies. One of them was Linda Taylor, famous throughout the United States. Ronald Reagan defined it as “a cancer that eats our organs”. Paid for by the conservative media, Linda walked the television sets detailing her fraud strategies. The character was used by the former president to demonize social assistance in a classist, racist and sexist cocktail that was very effective in propping up neoliberal constructions like the State takes taxes from honest workers to support a bunch of undesirables.
There are so many things that are not understood. One gets lost between so much good and so much evil. Carlos Tevez has become these days the king of the energy subsidy. The Ministry of Economy brought to light the list of businessmen, entertainment and sports celebrities who, despite having wealthy millionaires, kept the subsidy so as not to pay high energy consumption. Those aggregate riches of individuals of also high ethics. Curious “celebrities” who do not blush their faces for fattening public spending. The list is juicy and transversal: Carlos Tevez: $2,933,000; Blaquier family: $1,600,000; Juan Carlos and Sebastián Bagó, the owners of Bagó laboratories: $1,000,000, Hilda “Chiche” González: $474,008; Araceli González: $335,124; Eduardo Constantini: $289,743; Julio Comparada (former president of Independiente): $233,747; Marcela Tinayre: $187,313; David Nalbandian: $74,369; Mirtha Legrand: $89,608; Francisco Macri, son of Mauricio Macri: $60,830; Carlos Fernando Rosenkrantz: $48,256; Fabian Cubero: $25,467. Some of the list still ask why they have to pay taxes. Tevez filed an amparo appeal to be exempt from paying the solidarity contribution to large fortunes. Giving a shoulder in difficult moments of the pandemic is “confiscatory”, getting drunk from the beaten “boob” of the State to cover energy needs is satisfactory. If there were even one grain of truth in the spillover theory: the peculiar idea that enriching those at the top is to everyone’s benefit.
The Federal Tax Execution Court No. 4 agreed with the AFIP and sentenced the former soccer player to pay 42,361,511 pesosfor a tax debt corresponding to the Personal Property Tax corresponding to the fiscal period 2020. Society is more than the sum of its individuals, the general interest is more than private interests.
“There is no medicine that can cure the origin of class, not even the money that may come later, or the social prestige that is acquired. It is a wound from whose pain you defend yourself, and even before your own already declassed children you pull out the animal nails from below”, wrote Rafael Chirbes. He will know Tevez what he is talking about.