Last night, as it has been since May 1, Marcel Cholaku once again spoke unquestionably on his home TV A3, aka CNN, carelessly walking the streets, but I’m afraid that even on another television, someone would not know to give him without giving up the rude errors in the information he connects with thupeu, as any political leader in Romania, a country where fact-checking has become a subject of reproach.

Because:

– not “only Russia”, but also Lithuania and, what to watch, neighboring Hungary; just for such a mistake on raw data, a Western leader compromises himself, and the next day he is criticized by the entire press; we have complete silence, everyone takes his statement like pelicans as if it were true;

– Cholaku confuses “income” with “wages” and jumps from one to the other as if they are the same thing; in fact, in Romania, personal incomes are significantly different from wages, that is, they are higher, and if progressive taxation of wages was practiced in our country (with significant bureaucratic costs in ANAF), progressive taxation of total income would be a monumental task for the state Romanian language in its current state digital functional illiteracy;

In fact, Cholaku does not pay attention to these things and knows very well what he is doing: he throws away the words written on a piece of paper by his political consultants who put on a different hat in the evening and always appear on television as “independent analysts”. “. Hence the association with Russia, and generally throwing the topic on the table, as the future prime minister did, is necessary to fuel polarization in the country, and not to clarify something or leave a viable plan. He knows that 50% TVs and websites he has in his pocket will faithfully convey his words, no matter what the morons say.

And on the other half of the mass media, an identity-tribal battle will begin between “progressives” and “uniques”, who will clash with speculative opinions and principled arguments, as the Romanian likes, who has his own opinion about everything (that the more general and abstract the problem, the stronger and his point is sharper) no one really has any research or fiscal modeling on hand to see what the impact of any reform will be. Because our politics are Byzantine, focused on palace intrigues and clashes of dogmas; the Renaissance has not yet reached us, when people discovered numbers, experimented and debated based on empirical evidence.

We are not even able to discuss what is more profitable for Romania, i.e. to be for or against the progressive, because the government, the Ministry of Finance and the parties continue the scandalous practice of not publishing data and not writing reports from head to tail about public finances, which is especially necessary when major changes are being proposed, such as this one with taxes. What are the scenarios, what are the advantages and what are the administrative costs of the reform – and especially, how much additional money is expected to be received in the budget from the application of the progressive? Zero work, zero training, only press conferences, television interviews taken on the knees, and a shrill drivel in the act of government, with measures taken by ear, removed, forgotten, dug up again, etc.

Last week, I showed here the ridiculous results of a “16 percent increase in salary taxation above the presidential salary” in the budget, an idea put forward by the Čolaku-Chichiu couple: somewhere between 50 and 100 million euros, the same as the mayor sector of Beluce to pour his excessive concrete slab on Piața Unirii, about 400 meters long. It is not clear whether this is a progressive thing that Cholaku is talking about now, or whether it was another plan that was abandoned in the meantime, as in fashion: the week and the reform were sung by Manelist at some press conference. In fact, it doesn’t even matter, because they are not interested in the economic consequences, but in the political ones, that is, stirring up the water and pushing the commentators to the crack, spending hundreds of hours on a sterile debate, superficially documented to the level of Cholak (“only Russia…”).

In short, we are in the dark and cannot know what these people want with taxes, except that they wave some slogans on May 1. The PSD used to have a Research Institute where various supporters of the party rubbed mint; in addition, it regularly receives expert assistance from FES, the foundation of German socialists. But the money cut in this way never produced a written plan for tax reform, adopted by the party or at least one of its leaders, so that we know what we are talking about and can later test the implementation in reality. In fact, PSD decision-makers do not even come to FES events, when German-hired experts present public policy reports on fiscal issues; it is doubtful that they will ever read them. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro