Last Thursday, June 30, the government’s economic team presented the Rendering of Accounts before Parliament, in which it is highlighted that, of the 225 million dollars increased in social spending, 49 million will go to education, 27 million to security , 26 million for the development of science and technology and 70 million for salary increases for public employees.
In a dialogue with LARED21, the Frente Amplio deputy Gustavo Olmos said that there are aspects in which the figures “do not agree” with the objective that the government plans to achieve. In this sense, he exemplified that in education, the government has the expectation of creating up to 60 “María Espínola” high school and UTU full-time Educational Centers, which are “the same as some that already existed in the Broad Front government, the only The difference is that those of the FA government were on the same property where there was a school and a high school, in this case the high school may be somewhere else, but it is the same plan, the same study program, teachers and workload”.
“The first María Espínola Centers were carried out with works that had already been awarded and financed from the previous government. Now they have to do the civil work, construction, and that means an outlay of around 2 million dollars each. So there is no way that with the 49 million dollars that are proposed, that will be achieved, ”said the Frente Amplio legislator.
He recalled that the president of CODICEN, Robert Silva, has said that there is a negotiation with Economy and that later he will give him more funds, he would reinforce the items, it is a legal possibility, “but in any case it is not in the Accountability project, and the Executive does not assume any commitment”.
Olmos added that in terms of salary, there are items that do not know where they go and allow “a lot of discretion on the part of the Executive.”
“There are two large items, one for the Ministry of Defense and the other for the Ministry of the Interior, and it is said that later the Executive Power will regulate how they are distributed, so if it were voted that way, Parliament would lose control of the destination of the funds. and then the Executive could increase the salary of the troops or only that of the officers”, he remarked.
As for science, he said that 23 million dollars are announced, “in reality, strictly for research there are 4 million, referred to the National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII), then another 10 million are for companies that will do innovation work but not for research, and then there are 12 million for the audiovisual institute. It is presented as science, but there are different items included”.
Don’t spill a penny down
Olmos stated that the current Rendering of Accounts is “coherent with the government’s economic policy, of an enormous transfer of resources from workers to employers.”
The government’s expectation is that the country’s wealth will increase by 5.4 billion dollars; “However, the government proposes that real wages at the end of the period will be the same as at the beginning, that is, those 5.4 billion dollars will not spill a penny down.”
“The government is defying the laws of gravity and causing the spill to be from the bottom up and not from the top down,” the opposition parliamentarian joked.
I emphasize that it is a Rendering of Accounts that reflects the economic model of the government that bets on “weakening the public, and that the private is what takes it forward without caring about the distribution of wealth and, on the other hand, with an absolute lack of a strategy to reverse the crisis that has been generated by the pandemic and by government decisions.”
He exemplified that in Tourism, “a sector absolutely destroyed by the pandemic, there is only one article and it is administrative, it has nothing to do with tourism policies and that is the trend. There is no use of the State to help reactivate the economy, there is a progressive withdrawal of the State and an advance of the private sector”.
