In an extensive presentation, the provincial Executive gave an account of the adjustment policies by the Milei government that especially affect the Province of Buenos Aires. They detailed a debt of the national state with the Province for 7.8 billion pesos. It would be made up of direct debts such as the Teacher Incentive Fund, transfers from the ANSES to the IPS, transportation subsidies and other specific contributions for social policies for more than 2 billion pesos and would be completed with the impact of the paralysis of more than thousand public works committed by the national government in the PBA, for another 5 billion. The Kicillof government adds to this equation the loss of revenue caused by the economic recession.
Faced with this panorama in which the Buenos Aires government frames the situation of the province, the budget’s main objective is to be a shield to cushion the blow that the people of Buenos Aires are suffering. Analyzing the reality of the working class and the popular sectors together with the priorities set by the budget, this objective is very far from being achieved.
A budget of adjustment and precariousness
The total budget amounts to $34,322,892,031,927 pesos, growing by 34.5% compared to the 2024 budget. This information is tentative since during 2024 there was no sanctioned budget, but rather it was operated with the extended 2023 budget. Likewise, the government did not publish last year’s budget execution report. As the Buenos Aires representative Laura Cano (PTS – Frente de Izquierda) denounced in a recent interview, the budget presented supports an adjustment in significant items, also in the salaries of workers, and maintains job insecurity.
To take just a few facts: let’s start with the salary guideline. For the year 2025, spending growth of 34.5% is proposed (based on inflation projected for next year). However, the amount allocated to personnel increases by only 30%, once again lagging behind total expenditures. That is to say, this budget is based on the premise that salaries will again lose to inflation.
But furthermore, nothing of what was lost in recent years is recovered. With Vidal’s administration, the salary of state employees, teachers, and health workers lost 30 points in purchasing power, while during the five years that the current governor Kicillof has been in office, as we propose in this note, the loss was 28 points. . Thus, a provincial model based on poor workers, whose income does not cover the cost of living, is consolidated.
Education, which due to its volume (according to data from the budget bill itself, affects 5 million students and more than 600 thousand workers) is the most important item in the budget, continues to decrease. Regarding the year 2023, its participation in the total pie declines by 1.4% and totals a 6-point drop since 2003.
The health budget increases by just 29.6% in relation to 2024, remaining 5 points below the 34.5% increase in spending on average, while the allocation for security increases by 42.5%, in accordance with the security policy of the governor. More bullets and less health and education.
Likewise, all emergency laws are extended until December 2026, which freezes the state plant and allows, among other things, hiring in different forms of precariousness. This is the situation of the 10,000 scholarship workers from the Ministry of Health, who do not have labor rights, and work in the province’s hospitals, as well as that of other thousands of workers who are also scholarship holders, with contracts as monotributistas or even those who They are paid through a social plan in the rest of the jurisdictions of the provincial administration. A budget that reinforces job insecurity in the State, not only taking away the rights of thousands of workers, but also defunding by not making contributions to social security, both the IOMA and the IPS.
It provides for the creation of only 2,249 new positions, of which 1,500, 70%, are for the penitentiary service. The 260 positions created for the already emptied childhood organization are entirely temporary, that is, without stability.
Debt to pay debt
The words of Governor Kicillof still resonate when he took office in 2019, describing as fraudulent the debt contracted by the management of María Eugenia Vidal, denouncing that it was not for social investment, nor for any benefit for the people of Buenos Aires. However, the current budget project requests authorization to borrow up to US$ 1,045,000,000 and US$ 250,000,000 in treasury bills, intended to pay debt already acquired, that is, to legitimize and revalidate that scam that the PRO. However, the budget estimates the financial needs of the province at almost 2 and a half billion pesos, including here not only the public debt to which we already referred, but also the increase in other liabilities.
A bicycle that we workers and our families end up paying with greater adjustment. Not even in times of crisis like the current one, where the Province concentrates the highest rates of poverty and indigence in the country, as the project itself describes, aggravated by cuts by the national government, the governor is willing to ignore this odious debt . This permanent drain on resources is incompatible with solving the needs that really affect the Buenos Aires majority: employment, health, access to decent housing, infrastructure and services.
The proposed budget presented allocates 58 times the women and diversity budget to debt services and represents 42% of the health budget.
While what was paid during 2024 is the equivalent of the entire food reinforcement program developed by the budget project. The Government’s main effort continues to be with creditors.
A budget with a gender perspective?
In its extensive introduction, the project is presented as a budget with a gender perspective, which would be laughable if it were not tragic, given that the province of Buenos Aires is the territory with the most femicides in the country. As Anabella Colli reported in Contrastes Bonaerenses, in many districts of the province there are no homes for women victims of violence or corresponding public policies. But going to the numbers, the budget allocated to the Ministry of Gender and Diversity represents 0.04% of the total. This number is not only ridiculous, but it also falls compared to the previous budget.
As representative Laura Cano stated, the governor chooses to prioritize the large businessmen and landowners of the province to whom he granted a “RIGI Bonaerense”, promoting provincial tax benefits, which add to an already regressive tax structure. It prioritizes continuing to pay the debt at the cost of affecting social and labor items, which is why the deputies of the Left Front have been maintaining the need to reject this budget, not only in the premises when treatment is given, but fundamentally in the streets. That is why it is necessary to demand that the union centers break the truce and put into motion the strength of the working class and the popular sectors, to confront the adjustment policy of Milei and the governors.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
