What an interesting and unexpected turn the story of the "pension robbery" has taken. We at the ACF worked on it a lot—it was an important issue, after all: 25 million people in their prime working years were cheated out of money (240–300 billion rubles).
Let me remind you that we organized a public campaign against that decision at the time. Thousands of people took part in it. And now the news is in: the government has decided to spend pension money confiscated from citizens ... on Crimea.
The authorities will spend Russians' frozen pension savings on Crimea This year alone, the peninsula could receive more than 240 billion rubles Read the full article
According to Bloomberg, federal budget spending on Crimea could amount to 260 billion rubles. No formal calculations have been made yet, a senior Finance Ministry official insists. According to him, the Finance Ministry would like to keep it within 243 billion rubles—money saved by freezing funded pension contributions in 2014. Those funds had been reserved in the federal budget for possible emergency anti-crisis measures, but President Vladimir Putin authorized spending them on Crimea, another Finance Ministry official explains. "It cannot be ruled out that 243 billion rubles will not be enough. In that case, budget spending will have to be increased," he says. For now, the spending is being calculated without including the cost of developing Crimea, a Finance Ministry employee notes: "Roads, energy infrastructure, housing and utilities are not included here." It is becoming obvious that spending on Crimea will be very large and the government will need to cut other expenditures, says a government staffer. Earlier, the federal budget aid needed for Crimea was estimated at 91 billion rubles: 55 billion, according to Finance Ministry calculations, for budget balancing, and 36 billion, according to the Labor Ministry, for pensions. Wonderful. They started with 91 billion, then gradually began increasing it, and now it's already, "we'd like to keep it within 243 billion, but it's possible that won't be enough." We've seen this somewhere before..... They started at 190 billion and ended at 1.5 trillion..... Oh right, it was here http://sochi.fbk.info/ What excellent logic: we need hundreds of billions upon billions, so let's take it out of citizens' pensions. Naturally, no one is disputing the basic logic: Crimea is now part of Russia, so the same pensions and public-sector salaries, etc., have to be paid there. They have to be paid, they have to be raised, and so on. But why not, umm... diversify Crimea's funding sources. Deputies' salaries could be cut—450,000 rubles a month is clearly more than they need. Gazprom's and Rosneft's investment programs could be trimmed by the amount of their obviously inflated cost estimates. And we lose a trillion rubles a year to theft in public procurement—enough for four Crimeas. Why the hell do they have to dip into pension money? And not just pension money, but other people's pension money. There is some terribly suspicious hustle going on around this "aid to Crimea." Fortunately, there is no war there and no natural disaster. No starving people in the streets. No epidemic. Nothing else that would require truly EMERGENCY AID and a nationwide fundraising drive. There may well be problems with energy supplies and water, but those need to be addressed in an orderly, planned way. And in general, I would like to see a more detailed spending plan. Where exactly will these 243 billion go? Everywhere this kind of "WE'RE URGENTLY ALLOCATING BILLIONS" starts, without any obvious natural disaster, it turns into something obvious: GIVE US THE BILLIONS QUICKLY, WE'LL STEAL THEM WHILE THE WATER IS MURKY. The referendum will write it all off. All this stuff about "public-sector workers in Rostov donated one day's wages to help Crimea"—what is that? Where is that money being sent? And to whom? And why aren't public-sector workers in Rostov donating one day's wages to help Rostov? It feels as if this were not Crimea (where people definitely do not live much worse than in somewhere like Tambov Region), but the starving Central African Republic, hit by a meteorite in the middle of a bloody massacre. Kindergarten No. 70. Naberezhnye Chelny from here
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