So, here in Portugal we’ve already been through some months under a right-wing government during a period of “economic crisis”. Honestly, I even stopped reading news because I get depressed all the time I realize how deeply are they screwing our society and economy.
For a start, so far the government approach towards public transportation is a complete disaster. The goals of public transportation are supposed to be helping poorer people get a way to move, and to push for cleaner and better transport solutions (like making it cheaper than cars in order to take cars out of big cities).
Of course that, in order to achieve these goals, public transports have to operate in debt, with the missing money being collected by the government, e.g. using the income tax.
And of course, due to these non-profit goals, public transports should be managed by the state. But in an attempt to make some politicians happy (and, some may say, also in an attempt to provide some “jobs for the boys”), our public transportation services have been turned into state-owned corporations, what highlights red debt numbers in accounting. Unfortunately, some politicians don’t care much about the goals of public transportation and dislike red numbers (even when these need to be there), what leads to certain bad decisions.
So, the government decided to raise the ticket prices, instead of raising the income tax to cover the red numbers. Then they offered a “solution” for poorer people. A “solution” with more problems: it does not account for border conditions — either people are poor enough to get help, either they are rich enough to afford it. People in the middle have to get poorer in order to afford tickets. This, of course, will increase the social divide and lead to a social crisis. It also requires a lot of unneeded bureaucracy (because you need to prove you can’t afford it, so you have to bring papers and wait on a line).
This just highlights another issue, already seen with the previous, centre-left government (which fell due to a humorous political circus): they insist in increasing prices of public services and the VATs, instead of increasing the income tax.
That is, people who have less money are the most affected, and people with more money end up paying less. I guess it should be the other way around? Again, this is a trend that will lead to a worse social divide.
Instead of increasing the income tax, the government also decided to cut on public administration wages. This not only has the problems above (and the ones below), it is also a completely unfair situation, why should PA workers be the only ones supporting the crisis in this way? Again, the income tax would allow to apply this cut evenly and fairly to all citizens.
Another pearl are the measures supported both by the former government and by the new government, regarding wages and taxes paid by employers: they decided to keep the minimum wage the same (which, I remember, may actually mean they decreased the wage, after accounting for inflation…) and to decrease taxes paid by employers.
This means (again, after adjusting for inflation) that now there’s less money the government can tax. This also lowers the purchasing power, making an economic recovery harder to pursuit, and makes it harder to get these values (wages and taxes) back on track in the future (because it will be a bigger jump and employers will get “mad” about it). And again, this also helps widening the social divide.
So I think the current government is making sure we spend the next decades in a deep social crisis.
