2016 State Budget makes the poor poorer and the rich richer

 

Statement of Christos Christofides, AKEL Political Bureau member

AKEL C.C. Press Office, 13th December 2015, Nicosia

 

The 2016 state budget is unfortunately following the line of previous ones. It is the third consecutive state budget of the Anastasiades government that expresses precisely the same policy: taking away incomes from the working classes, loading the burden of the crisis on the backs of the popular strata, at the same time as the government and ruling forces are protecting and contributing to the maximization of the profits of the rich.

Much can be said about the budgets tabled, but their main feature is this: they continue the government’s policy on the economy, which has resulted during the last three years in Cyprus heading the table in the number of inequalities across Europe, making the poor poorer and the rich richer.

With its policy to serve the affluent strata and shift the burden on the backs of the poor, the government tried to present it as a “necessity” and to give it a “national” and “beneficial” picture. The truth, as the figures themselves testify, is very different: the government and ruling forces implemented a punishing class policy in favour of the rich and against the overwhelming majority of the people. The results of their policy are well-known: unemployment, poverty, emigration, enormous social inequalities, foreclosures of primary family homes and “red” loans and the selling off of public wealth and assets.

AKEL believes that there is an alternative: the path of real growth and development, with the state and the public sector as the driving force, with a real budget boosting growth that will create, among other things, new jobs.