Rampant inflation, a booming black market for US dollars and crippling debt - welcome to Argentina, one of the world's most dysfunctional economies. How did ...
If I were to answer this with what I really think, it would start with “seize the means of production”. However Lemmy is full of other communists than me, and plenty of them would do a better job defending this line of thought than I do. Instead I’ll focus on other stuff. (Keep in mind that I don’t consider myself “economically literate”.)
The problem that I see with The Economist is not that it’s preaching austerity, or “spend less money”; that’s fine. The problem is that it’s beelining to blame social programs and the size of the government for ideological reasons. It’s fine to cut a bit of money going to the social programs but the main issue with them is to optimise the usage of the money from those programs, to stimulate the economy in the long run while fulfilling their social purpose. And that got to be on a provincial level, because the issues in (let’s say) Jujuy will be completely to the ones in Rio Negro, and both will be different from the ones in Buenos Aires province.
In other words, relay the money and the responsibility of the social programs to the provinces.
Money printing needs to end, the sooner the better. Because otherwise the social programs don’t matter, since the value of the money is still leaking from the population into the federal government’s coffers. If necessary to default, do it. And perhaps a set of policies resembling the Brazilian Plano Real could work to stabilise the inflation, but perhaps this wouldn’t be even needed.
But whatever they do, they need to roll it gradually. Sudden changes fuck an economy really bad.
I also agree with TE that dollarisation won’t solve anything. It’ll make the problem worse, by tying the local economy to one in the middle of nowhere, and to another central bank that will give even less fucks to the Argentinian population. It’s basically the damage that the dollar smugglers already cause on the economy, except institutionalised.
If I were to answer this with what I really think, it would start with “seize the means of production”. However Lemmy is full of other communists than me, and plenty of them would do a better job defending this line of thought than I do. Instead I’ll focus on other stuff. (Keep in mind that I don’t consider myself “economically literate”.)
The problem that I see with The Economist is not that it’s preaching austerity, or “spend less money”; that’s fine. The problem is that it’s beelining to blame social programs and the size of the government for ideological reasons. It’s fine to cut a bit of money going to the social programs but the main issue with them is to optimise the usage of the money from those programs, to stimulate the economy in the long run while fulfilling their social purpose. And that got to be on a provincial level, because the issues in (let’s say) Jujuy will be completely to the ones in Rio Negro, and both will be different from the ones in Buenos Aires province.
In other words, relay the money and the responsibility of the social programs to the provinces.
Money printing needs to end, the sooner the better. Because otherwise the social programs don’t matter, since the value of the money is still leaking from the population into the federal government’s coffers. If necessary to default, do it. And perhaps a set of policies resembling the Brazilian Plano Real could work to stabilise the inflation, but perhaps this wouldn’t be even needed.
But whatever they do, they need to roll it gradually. Sudden changes fuck an economy really bad.
I also agree with TE that dollarisation won’t solve anything. It’ll make the problem worse, by tying the local economy to one in the middle of nowhere, and to another central bank that will give even less fucks to the Argentinian population. It’s basically the damage that the dollar smugglers already cause on the economy, except institutionalised.