“The authorities boasted of the fact that it is the first time for 25 years that the draft budget was submitted to the Parliament in October. Nevertheless, the issue is solved at the eleventh hour. The 2017 budget offered by the Government is far from ideal, to put it mildly,” Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Feldman declared on his Facebook page.
According to his words, this draft includes neither the development ideology and nor the social profile. “They tried to convince Ukrainians of the opposite with the help of the minimum wages increase, but without pegging to the first wage level and living wage, it is just a trick to increase taxes. The dollar rate of UAH 27.2 is fixed in the budget, and it is also an open manipulation. For example, in 2016 budget, dollar was at the rate of UAH 24, so maybe the Cabinet of Ministers can give Ukrainians a hint where to buy the currency at this rate?” Oleksandr Feldman stated. “The budget revenue looks unrealistic: it is planned to obtain UAH 100 billion at the expense of ‘special confiscation,’ the law on which hasn’t been adopted yet. UAH 17 billion more of the expected receipts are built into the budget at the expense of privatization, although the privatization program totally failed in 2016.” “Budget deficit, according to various estimations, will be from UAH 77 billion to UAH 150 billion, so we should prepare ourselves once again to the increase in prices and fall of currency. A lot of government expenditures are shifted onto local councils, which is fraught with the failure of financing of vital fields like education and health protection. As for the attitude of the authorities to education, it is described best of all by the novation in scholarship calculation, which is currently the reason of students’ protests. On the other hand, the failure to enact the budget may cause the real social and economic catastrophe: currency crisis, suspension of salaries and pensions, ‘manual control’ by the Cabinet of Ministers. Like a bad peace is better than the best of wars, so the imperfect budget is better for the state than its absence,” the politician emphasized.
