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By autumn the Yabloko faction of the State Duma
will prepare its own variant of the state budget for 2003 as an
alternative to the government’s draft budget. Grigory Yavlinsky’s
colleagues have still not decided what their budget will focus
on in 2003. Priorities here may be education, military reform
or demographic problems. In the end, the choice of priorities
is not a financial task, it is only “a problem of the political
will of the authorities,” explained deputy of the Duma Igor
Artemyev who heads Yabloko’s group for the development of
the budget, to Vremya Novostei. For example, when the authorities
set last year the task of conducting army reform as soon as possible,
according to Artemyev, an additional 1% of the revenue part of
the budget for 2002 had to be spent on defence.
But foreign debt remains the main priority for the government
this year, as it was last year. A financial reserve was created
last year inside the budget. According to Artemyev, such a priority
does not require the government to make “any structural
decisions”. For example, the Cabinet is dissatisfied with
the fact that a considerable proportion of wages are still not
declared. To legalise the new incomes the government introduced
two years ago a flat rate of income tax and has not proposed anything
else since then. A year ago Yabloko proposed abruptly cutting
(halving) the rate of the single social tax. In addition the party
insisted that employers should only pay half of today’s
social tax. Workers should pay the other half from their wages.
Igor Artemyev thinks that with the help of such measures a considerable
part of undeclared earnings would be legalized.
This year Yabloko will also propose the same scheme for abruptly
reducing the social tax rate as an alternative to the government’s
propositions. The faction also plans to submit to the State Duma
a draft law on providing an amnesty for capital and a package
of laws on small business.
See also:
Budget
2003
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