No matter how you look at it, from back to front or front to back, right or wrong or right and wrong, the conclusion does not change:
the Omnibus Law marathon is above all an argument for money, for a lot of money.
Furthermore, it happens in a country that is not growing, that in fact is going backwards and where the resources that are generated are poorly distributed.
Thus, once the game was open, one of the first crossings between some governors and the Minister of the Interior, Guillermo Francos, was over a proposal for the so-called Country Tax to be shared with the provinces, almost in halves.
They speak of a creation that is the result of the critical shortage of dollars, a relative of the stocks, which taxes the purchase of foreign currency for hoarding and the payment of expenses abroad with credit or debit cards at 30%.
The point is that even when the final destination of the funds is the ANSeS, the PAMI and works for social housing as established by the regulations, the money goes through the National Treasury
and can be used, at least temporarily, for expenses of the Nation until it ends where it belongs.
We are talking about
safe silver
, often fattened by devaluations that run behind inflation.
In figures for the year 2023, the collection of the Country Tax left 1.5 trillion pesos, an amount similar to that contributed by withholdings and half of the Check Tax.
First-class resources, which exceeded those of 2022 by a nominal 335% and, for the same reason, took 124 percentage points off the inflation of 211%.
And they jumped an impressive 1,252% in January.
It is understood, then, why President Javier Milei cut off the debate as soon as it appeared, removed the fruit of the discord from the Omnibus Law and left the distribution as it was at the beginning: everything goes through the National State station.
WITHHOLDINGS AND MILEI
Something similar happened with the increase in withholdings on exports of soy by-products, corn, wheat and meat, plus the fraud raised by the announcement.
Behind the measure there was a central piece of information and, subsequently, a mountain of dollars that are not shared, pointing to 2024.
According to projections from specialized sources, this year there would be an
increase in exports from the field estimated at over US$ 13,000 million.
The full bill would be around US$32 billion and it is anticipated that the loss caused by the drought last year will be recovered.
Also, the increase in withholdings would bring the Nation an extra US$ 1.6 billion.
Put in this way and without computing the effect of the super devaluation of Milei, the equation means loss for the producers or loss of earning and pure and good collection for Minister Luis Caputo.
Obviously, not a single word from the Casa Rosada on the matter and least of all the word co-participation.
Added to the general picture, a report by specialist Nadin Argañaraz puts the January 2024 accounts in perspective, starting with
the nominal drop of 213% that transfers through co-participation to the provinces showed compared to January 2022
.
Taking into account an inflation of 20%, the nominal drop turns towards a real drop of 11%.
The explanation falls cleanly on the impact of the reform in the Income Tax that the candidate Sergio Massa imposed and that hit, above all, provincial resources and among them those of Buenos Aires more than any other.
It meant a serve of 38.8% that made January's participation the worst record in the last nine years.
In case it remains to be clarified, the reversal with the Massa reform and the improvement in the provincial accounts that regularizing things will imply will have to wait for some pending issues of the Omnibus Law to be resolved.
All during a time that does not exactly look auspicious for taxes associated with economic activity: a 2.8% drop has been calculated by the IMF or recalculated, since a previous estimate also gave 2.8% but negative.
THE PROVINCES
Inevitable, in this novel of numbers the numbers follow.
The attractive fact, if you like, is that here the numbers mean a lot of money, sometimes power disputes and, of course, winners and losers.
The figures that follow belong to a type of fiscal repertoire that Kirchnerism managed like no one else.
They are called “Discretionary Transfers”, they are resources that arise from underestimating inflation and are administered from the Casa Rosada according to the political interests of power.
Contrary to what was foreseeable, in that business the province of Buenos Aires and Axel Kicillof reigned without competition between 2020 and 2023.
A round example of the game appears, precisely, in 2023 of the chained elections.
To begin with, the money that was in the box that year was around 14.5 billion pesos and of that, Kicillof received 43% of that package, that is, around 6 billion.
To better understand why specialists call these funds discretionary, some comparative data from 2023 is useful:
for the City of Buenos Aires it was 6.6% and for Chaco and Santa Fe, 4.2% per head.
In order to complete the board, the inflationary hypothesis that was used to define budgetary expenses was 60% and real inflation escalated to 211%.
The difference was income outside the Budget that the government had available and managed as it pleased.
Now we have a similar case, starting with the contrast between inflation that the 2023 Budget extended to 2024 and in force projects at 69.5% and the 213% estimated by the studies that the Central Bank consults monthly.
A similar or more or less similar case would be worth clarifying.
The thing is that in January of this year
the “Discretionary Transfers” fell by a real 98%, discounting inflation, against 2023
which, according to Nadin Argañaraz, can be interpreted as a “virtual disappearance” of the account.
That is, from an account that in 2023 totaled 14.5 billion and in the four K years, an impressive 29 billion.
Evidently wherever you look, those who do not fall into any distribution are the retirees despite the fact that their assets accumulate a real adjustment, or a real loss, of 48% in the last six years.
It is notable that among so much noise, so much flag and so much poster, nothing appears that sounds like a claim for retirees and if the issue is those who have been postponed, there is a case of endless lack of protection here.