2024-01-13 02:55:00
As we pointed out in previous columns, the social catastrophe is advancing. The INDEC released the CPI (Consumer Price Index) for December 2023, measured after the inflationary flash where the León took the dollar from $366 to $800. A devaluation of 118%.
The number is known, at a general level the CPI for December reached 25.3%, the highest since 1990 and almost six times the index of Chavista Venezuela. However, this general level being catastrophic in itself, in the strategic “food and beverages” category it is even worse and rose to 29.7% monthly, totaling 251.3% annually.
Projecting data from November, the Poverty Basket – its value for the month of December is not yet officially known – reaches a cost of $502,000 for a type 2 household of four metropolitan members, while the caloric survival basket for the same household , the so-called Indigence Basket, amounts to $240,500 per month.
As we said in these Perfil columns, in that same period, average formal private salaries amounted to $394,000 gross in mid-December, applying the legal discounts, they reached $315,000 net, barely 62% of the value of the basket of December poverty.
This signals an unprecedented deterioration in salary – in this case formal private – with respect to the poverty line. Not to mention the average informal salary that does not reach 50% of the value of the poverty line for the month of December.
Strictly speaking, the inflationary burn and dwindling income do not seem like a mistake but rather an effect sought by the current “libertarian” government.
The levels of poverty and indigence after knowing the inflation level for December exceed 45 and 12% respectively, while unemployment has exceeded double digits. All in one month of managing the fourth neoliberal wave that we suffer in the country, the baptismal one in dictatorship, three in democracy.
Thus, in the middle of the current year, “the chainsaw kid”, the “lion”, the “cuddly bear”, you choose the reader’s nickname, will bring both indicators to the levels of the year 2001, just contained below with plans of income transfer managed by the state apparatus and the Social Movements, despite the redundancy.
Waiting for this scenario to take hold is insane for the entire political spectrum, whether pro-government or opposition. Let us just remember that after the outbreak of almost a quarter of a century of neoliberalism with the crisis of 2001, in the midst of enormous political fragmentation, an almost unknown Néstor Carlos had to become president, with barely 22% of the votes. Kirchner, so that, due to his determination and strategic vision, political authority would be restored and the traditional caste, whether pro-government or opposition, could walk the streets again.
The extortionate levels of the government were expressed better than anyone by Toto Caputo, the minister who, as economist Sergio Chouza points out, “made Argentina the only country in the world in which a part of the population applauds the same official who renegotiated a loan.” “He asked for it and he skated it.”
At the conference after the announcement of the “agreement” with the Fund, Caputo issued a very serious threat. “To the extent that the law (omnibus) does not pass, the measures will be harsher and Argentines will suffer more.” It doesn’t sound very libertarian.
Anyway, the truth is that today, while the parliament under extortion discusses the DNU and “Omnibus Law”, the acceptance of the debt and the conditionalities of the IMF, the increase in unemployment, poverty, destitution and the accelerated liquefaction of the value of the peso , the collapse of salaries, retirements, pensions and other forms of income, are already a fait accompli.
In this precise sense, Javier Gerardo Milei has already won, although probably, sooner rather than later he will not be able to walk the streets again, although this time, (alas!) it does not seem that a Néstor Kirchner is available to save us, nor the caste, nor to the León, nor to us, dear Perfil readers.
When that moment arrives, the warning that Luisa González, leader of the Citizen Revolution Movement, recently launched during the 2023 presidential campaign against a dollarized Ecuador and under narco-neoliberal crossfire will make sense: “Noboa’s plan only “It will leave prisons and cemeteries.” She is right.
*Director of Consultora Equis.
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