The elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, wants to radically transform the lives and economies of its fellow citizens. His goal is to return to the model that, he said, governed at the end of the 19th century and until the crisis of the 1930s, when this country became the barn of the worldsocial rights did not exist and women did not vote.
The image of the electric mower has accompanied him throughout his political conversion, from television talk show personality to presidential candidate. The chainsaw It is the metaphor of an economic shock that must leave its mark on all activities. These are some of the proposals that the far-right has expressed in his program to govern the South American country:
Suppression of the Central Bank
Graduated as a mathematical economist from a private university with debatable levels of demand, Milei transformed his way of understanding reality a decade ago by approaching the thinking of anarchocapitalist US Murray Rothbard an intellectual source from which the most extreme Trumpists also draw.
As part of this new education, Milei has made one of its main flags the elimination of the Central Bankconvinced that, if we stop printing banknotes and put an end to the regulatory intervention of the State, the inflation at short notice.
Dollarization and privatizations
The next president wants “Argentines to be able to trade in the currency they want.” But his most ambitious goal is dollarize the economy. Milei sees no problem in delegating monetary sovereignty to the United States Department of the Treasury and wants to continue the path it has undertaken more than two decades ago Ecuador. Numerous economists have warned that this is a madness of enormous social costs because it has as its first requirement pulverize the Argentine peso until it’s worth “excrement”, as Milei said in the election campaign, in the midst of a sharp rise in the price of the dollar that he stimulated through his journalistic statements. To dollarize the country, explained Carlos Rodríguez, a fundamental piece of her team of advisors, $40 billion is needed.
In his first intervention this Monday, Milei recalled that will privatize all state assets it can. But the goose that lays the golden eggs is the oil company YPF, where the State has 51% of the shares and is one of the architects of a process of energy autonomy whose results would begin to be seen in 2024. The president-elect has also announced his intention to do the same with the energy company Enarsa and with the public media entity. “Everything that can be in the hands of the private sector is going to be in the hands of the private sector,” he announced.
Milei is not afraid of the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to control public spending. His program contemplates tripling the recommendations of the financial organization and reducing the State budget items by 15%, eliminating ministries, subsidies and social aid. “We are dedicated to analyzing a reform of the State where more efficiency and lower costs can be achieved,” explained Diana Mondino, an economist designated as a future Foreign Minister. The extreme right knows that these prunings will cause a wave of protests. Milei has anticipated this scenario and is considering responding with firm hand.
The reduction in public spending would be accompanied by a elimination of taxes and energy subsidiesas well as a deep labour reform that bar achievements of the labor movement such as redundancy payment.
At the same time, the extreme right wants to return to the system of private pensionswhich ruled in the 90s and was nationalized 13 years ago.
Exports and trade opening
Along with a strong economic adjustment, Milei will encourage exports of grain, meat, energy and minerals significantly reducing taxes.
Milei denies the effects of climate change. Therefore, it considers irrelevant the discussions and complaints about the environmental costs caused by monoculture or the extraction of minerals and energy beneath the ground (shale oil).
Although he threatened during the campaign to break commercial alliances for strictly ideological reasons with China and Brazilwhich represent two million jobs, would have already established contacts with diplomatic representatives of both countries to explain to them that it was all electoral bravado.
Related news
As happened in other neoliberal cycles (1976, under the military regime, 1989, with Peronism in power, and 2015, under the presidency of Mauricio Macri), the future Government is in favor of a unrestricted commercial opening look in the mirror of the Chilean experience. “If I tell a prebendary businessman that he is going to have to compete with the world, after he reforms the State, the labor market and we are competitive in terms of tax pressure, he is not going to like it,” said Milei during the Campaign. These types of openings caused the closure of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses between 2015 and 2019 alone.
Without ministries of Culture and Education
In a country that prides itself on its writers and artists, the ministries of Education and Culture. He too Film Institute, which finances numerous projects, and public media. Milei will put into operation a Ministry of Human Capital with which, he assured, he seeks to eliminate inequality of opportunities.