This simply makes me happy. This alone made it worth launching the campaign.
I’m reading the discussions around our platform, and I can see that inequality, the minimum wage, and healthcare spending are becoming part of the opposition’s agenda.
This is tremendously important. Only this, together with the traditional human rights agenda and what is conventionally called the “political demands of Bolotnaya” (a reference to the 2011–2012 anti-government protest movement in Moscow), can provide a platform for a genuinely mass democratic opposition movement representing the interests of the majority.
Read this important column by University of Chicago professor Konstantin Sonin: "Liberalism and Winning Elections. Where Liberal Principles and a Populist Program Can Meet."
Konstantin rightly points out that it is not enough simply to talk about increasing education spending; we also need to pay attention to how archaic the system is, completely ignoring inequality in the country.
An oligarch and a person of modest means are treated as equals where they should not be—and vice versa.
Konstantin writes.
I would only adjust the terminology a bit. When we say “stop feeding the rich,” it suggests that large groups of people should be directly taxed. But in reality, Russia does not have any sizable “rich” class. Inequality is such that there is a microscopic number of the “very rich,” and then come the “poor” and the “very poor.”
Spread thinly between them is a barely surviving middle class—10% of Moscow residents and 5% of residents in the largest cities. How are they rich? Their entire “wealth” is that they have a home, a dacha (country house), a foreign car, and can afford to go to a restaurant once a week.
There is nothing to take from them, and there is no need to. On the contrary, they should be protected and given the chance to work normally.
What I would really like is for genuinely wealthy people to emerge in Russia, and for the poor—whose numbers have officially increased by 5%, and in reality by 14%—to have a chance to move into the middle class.
What we need to stop feeding is the oligarchs (using the terminology I described in my programmatic post). And the beauty of this slogan is that, in Russia, it is left-wing (for social justice), right-wing (against monopolies), conservative, and liberal all at once.
Also, read Vladimir Ashurkov’s piece, "Can Healthcare Spending Be Doubled?"
And be sure to read Professor Maxim Mironov of Spain’s IE Business School, who debunks the myths that our proposal to introduce a minimum wage of 25,000 rubles (about 25,000 RUB) is unrealistic, impossible, or harmful.
25,000 rubles—is that a lot or a little? A look at popular myths.
In short, unlike the authorities, the opposition has a positive agenda.
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