I’m reading this nonsense — "The Presidential Economic Council must find a recipe for 4% GDP growth" — and thinking about just how much history goes in circles. Maybe, sure, it’s a spiral, but it really looks like a circle.
You see, some people over there think we could even get 4% GDP growth sooner than that.
Guys, back in your blessed 2013, when there was no war and no sanctions, and oil was at $120 a barrel, GDP growth came to 1.3% against the government’s forecast of 3.5%.
So where exactly is 4% growth supposed to fall from now, even taking the low-base effect into account?
Have you carried out successful reforms? Improved the investment climate? Cut government spending? Increased labor productivity? Has Russia’s population grown by 15 million people?
Did you invent a new iPhone? Build a Silicon Valley? Did Chubais and Rosnano create an immortality pill? Where do these fantasies even come from?
It’s all that old Soviet-style "the five-year plan in four years."
"All participants in the meeting of the USSR State Planning Committee (Gosplan) have already gathered and agree that the five-year plan can be fulfilled in four years, but some believe it can be done in three," note Comrades Zaikov, Slyunkov, and Vorotnikov***.**
There they sit, these men in suits — they bankrupted the country. Back in the five-year-plan days, they arrived in black Volgas (a Soviet car associated with officialdom); now they come in black Mercedeses. They write this drivel and laugh at it themselves in the hallways and smoking rooms. Then the same drivel gets read out at the congresses of the CPSU/ONF/United Russia.
Everyone at these meetings knows perfectly well what the real recipe for GDP growth is, it’s just forbidden to talk about it: fighting corruption, cutting insane military and police spending, scrapping the idiotic "counter-sanctions," judicial reform, and investing in human capital rather than in the Rotenbergs, Timchenkos, and Shamalovs.
But if you say something like that at one meeting, you won’t be invited to the next. So instead, it’s "the five-year plan in four years."