Take a look at the Pension Fund’s press release on its 2017 performance.
A staggering claim: there are no pensioners in the Russian Federation living below the poverty line.
It’s simply indescribable arrogance, and a perfect example of what all government statistics are worth. Putin’s line that “the country has embarked on a path of confident growth” is from the same playbook.
They invented an idiotic “pensioner subsistence minimum” (the official minimum income threshold for retirees) that has nothing to do with real life, and then use that to calculate the “poverty line.” Keep that threshold absurdly low, and — hey presto — all pensioners suddenly stop being poor.
How neat and convenient: you can write a press release and award yourself a bonus.
Do you know what the current “pensioner subsistence minimum” is in Moscow, with its outrageous prices? 11,561 rubles per month. That’s 385 rubles a day for all expenses, including utilities.
So, in the opinion of the head of the Russian Pension Fund, who lives in a seven-room apartment in Patriarch’s Ponds (an upscale central Moscow neighborhood) measuring 335 square meters, a Moscow pensioner with, say, 387 rubles a day is no longer destitute and is living above the poverty line.
At this rate, we’re just waiting for the Pension Fund to start classifying such people as middle class.
Support our campaign, otherwise the Pension Fund will continue to be run by people who seriously claim that there are no pensioners in Russia living below the poverty line.