Even before the expected formal completion of Greece’s third bailout evaluation at next Monday’s Eurogroup meeting, the IMF is already piling up painful austerity measures for the fourth and last fiscal adjustment programme evaluation, which must be completed before Greece exits its bailout in August.

As Elena Laskari reports in the daily Ta Nea today, for salaried employees, pensioners, and farmers, along with the 18 percent pension cut that they will suffer as of 1 January, 2019, the IMF is determined to impose a lowering of the annual non-taxable income level to 5,685 euros – from 9,545 euros in 2015 and 8,636 euros in 2017 – resulting in an income reduction of up to 650 euros a year for individual taxpayers.

Together, the pension cuts and higher taxes will remove about 2 percent of GDP, a whopping 3.6 billion euros, from taxpayers’ pockets.

While Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras insists that elections will be held at the end of his term, in September, 2019, some analysts believe that if taxpayers know they will be saddled with fresh, major cutbacks in their income, the government may call snap elections in order to cut its own political losses.

A deal is a deal, pacta sunt servanda

The finance ministry recently sent out feelers to creditors about the prospect of not implementing certain already legislated austerity measures if Greece’s economic performance and revenues exceed expectations, and the proposal was categorically dismissed, despite the super-primary surplus produced by the government.

With extremely pared back public spending (a 1.7 billion euro cut compared to the revised November target), a slashed public investment programme, and astronomical taxation, last year’s primary surplus is expected to exceed the revised target of 2.4 percent of GDP, even after the barrage of social welfare benefits handed out by the government at the end of 2017.

Τελευταία Νέα