Escrivá does not want to be a useful fool for Díaz

Escrivá does not get the accounts. Each month must pay over 10,000 million euros to the almost nine million pensioners and it does not collect them with Social Security contributions. He is a professional who has become a public manager. An accountant who sees the bankruptcy of the pension system over time.

Diaz does not pay the bills either. But not the budgetary ones, his electoral accounts do not come out. Diaz sees as his platform, United We Can, lose votes, little by little, but without pause, and he needs to communicate that the presence of Podemos in the Government is necessary for his electorate. It is a policy: he is interested, above all, in the electoral consequences of his decisions.

Diaz does not pay the bills either. But not the budgetary ones, his electoral accounts do not come out

Escrivá needs more fees to fill the pension hole. This will only be achieved if the number of contributors increases: employees, companies and the self-employed. Without that it is impossible to square them.

Escrivá knows that the increase in the percentage of retirees and spending on pensions are unstoppable: because now the largest population cohorts, those of the ‘baby boom’; who contributed for many years, with higher salaries and have the right to better pensions than previous generations.

In addition, this Government has indexed pensions to the CPI with demand inflation and there are government measures, such as the increase in the SMI (Minimum Interprofessional Salary), which Díaz managed with almost four million unemployed registered in the SEPE, which go against job creation.

Escrivá also knows that for raising quotas has to delay the actual retirement age because the new population cohorts are smaller in number than those of the ‘baby boom’. For this reason, the pension of those who decide to continue in the pit after the official retirement age prevails and reduces it to those who want to anticipate it. That is why he said that change the Spanish “work culture” with regard to age. Work more between the ages of 55 and 75. He did not say that people cannot retire if they want to when it is their turn (67 years in the near future).

You could also apply another measure that, with mischief, is in force: active retirement. By virtue of it, people who renounce 50% of their pension can work. With this, they contribute something to Social Security, but above all they pay more personal income tax and, as they consume more, they also pay more VAT.

If those income were to the Social Security accounts, many would pay their pension for themselves, at least for a few years But why do they have to give up that 50% to work? That is the stinginess. If there were no reduction of the pension or this were a lower percentage (15% for example), surely many people would work (perhaps part-time or intermittently). With the taxes generated, part of the accounts that are brought upside down by the minister could be healed.

Now, what would Vice President Díaz say to that measure? That then young people would not fill those jobs. Merluzada communist that starts from the assumption that, if one works, another does not; who considers the labor market to be zero sum. A nonsense to which unions tend to join. The reality is that if people have income, they spend or save, they produce more jobs or investments (which are the jobs of the future).

In this dilemma, Escrivá is the scholar who wanted to tell a technical truth, Díaz the demagogue who wants to maintain the influence of the squalid PCE through United We Can and its electoral maintenance. A PCE that is a part and a small IU that, in turn, is another part, the youngest of United We Can, which, in addition, is the minority in the Government, ready these communists! Your small group commands much more than what corresponds to your reality. As it was said before: what a useful fool at your service!

Escrivá doesn’t want to be that: Díaz’s useful fool. The bad thing is that he wants to be Sánchez.

*** JR Pin is a professor at IESE.

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