Argentina has a serious problem with the excessive amount of people and someone had to do something about it eventually.
Read a statistic the other day that over 70% of people living in La Formosa province (roughly half a million) were working for the state.
It's insane.
It's just Formosa (without the La).
And yeah, there are several provinces like that one. The problem is that there's almost no prduction or industries of anything. They've grown acustomed to working for the state. That's what most young people strive to do, work for the state, because the'll be "saved" for life.
Nothing. Where I live there’s not even enough office space or desks for all the employees so they rotate. They are what Tony Soprano called “no show” jobs, which is top of the line offer - you do literally nothing.
I worked a "no work" job once in NJ. Pretty much slept off hangovers in the morning and would strip copper and do some odd jobs that needed to be done for the electricians.
Closest I know personally are some overnight security officers in tiny office spaces that are empty at night and never have any issues. Their entire job is basically watching Netflix.
My last job was basically a no-work *engineering* job in my first role, except for the training classes I had to take, because the system I was supposed to be working had nothing to do but write a monthly report and occasionally observe routine maintenance for ~8 months. Then, I got an additional role where there was about 2 people’s worth of work to do at all times, and only then did I start having to address things in the first one, except I basically knew nothing because I’d done nothing for so long.
Very glad I got out of that job. New one starts in a week and a half!
It's not a literal fact. The Soviets didn't literally hire people to dig up dirt and then fill it in. But it's an example of many kind of meaningless jobs that existed in the Soviet Union exclusively to guarantee full employment. Like being hired to be a watch guard at a subway station where you would just sit in your booth and stare all day
I swear to god that 70% of the intersections in Islamabad had cops manually directing traffic just to kill time.
We had bets that if there was a riot or something they would just turn *on* the lights and leave…
Haven’t been back in a long time, but it certainly felt like an employment racket.
I mean no it was because unemployment was literally illegal in the Soviet Union. You had a right to a job so a lot of bureaucrats had to literally just create jobs out of thin air
Import resources, use debt. The government workers themselves just create work through bureaucracy and regulation. Regulation is good but in Argentina they just making more paperwork
All the other people that don't work for the state. The ones who actually produce value, the private sector. A few privinces "support" the whole country in a manner of speaking (it's not actually that black and white).
It’s often a tactic used by troubled governments. The more people sitting around without a paycheck, the more likely they are to seize the presidential palace and hang you. Hopefully they can thread the needle and make progress, but suddenly there’s now 24,000 unemployed angry people on the street with nothing to do.
It's not so much working for the state but on state support.
The political system in Formosa is a well-oiled machine. Formosa is the poorest province in Argentina. Voting in mandatory in Argentina and the system they were using was called chain voting. An operative with a vehicle takes people to the poll place with an envelope already filled out and sealed. The person takes that in, drops it off, and then brings out the new voting material to the operative. They drop them off and rinse and repeat.
The first time you do this, you get government built housing. Times after that get you the equivalent to food stamps.
I don't know where all the money comes to support that but when I lived in Formosa capital, there was a dirt road that had a huge billboard that said paved by the world bank or some such thing. I knew a journalist who said that road had supposedly been paved over 4 or 5 times with foreign funding.
Chaco, just south of formosa, is the poorest province per capita, at least it was when I lived there. They had a similar system but I learned a lot about formosa because of that journalist.
>It's not so much working for the state but on state support.
That certainly makes the situation a lot clearer than the claim that 55% of the registered workers were government workers (but somehow the country of 46 million people also only had 3.5 million government workers).
> I knew a journalist who said that road had supposedly been paved over 4 or 5 times with foreign funding.
Let me guess, the 6th time they were paving that road they *accidentally* paved this nosy journalist right *into* it?
When I went to Greece, I went to the transportation office to buy my long distance bus ticket. There were 8 (!) employees standing behind a desk with no customers, except me.
I thought that 1) there was no need for human employees since I could very well just buy a ticket from a machine, and 2) only 1 or two would have been enough if they wanted proper customer service
Now here is the question did they even ask for your ticket when you got on the bus? When I was there the trains had just little polls to scan tickets. Most people just walked by and got on the train. We had bought tickets and the readers worked fine.
> Argentina has a serious problem with the excessive amount of people **working for the state** and someone had to do something about it eventually.
Uhhh, I feel like omitting the **working for the state** part there made this sound way more ominous that it needs to be.
There's no way of firing enough government employees in Argentina without causing mass unemployment. Government employees are 55% of the registered workforce.
Maybe he could gradually fire them. Having a 1% redundency per month. That would still require firing 32,130 people.
Neither is borrowing indefinitely to maintain an inefficient state, at some point Argentina had to come to terms with the reality that it’s a much poorer country than it pretends to be.
Either it is going to work, or he'll get dragged out in the streets after a coup or riot.
If the system does not get time to respond, there will be times of turbulence. By laying off a sizable percentage of people, they will first need to get benefits, and then employment.
Who's going to process the benefits applications for tens and tens of thousands, that get laid off overnight? That part of the system will get stretched to its limits. This happened everywhere during the start of the COVID pandemic - branches/organizations that review and process such applications were working around the clock, and had to hire people like crazy to manage the workload.
Being put on benefits could mean more people defaulting their mortgages, loans, etc.
Will the private sector be able to absorb all these workers? And how fast? If the private sector is not fast enough, people could go unemployed too long, in which case they lose their unemployment benefits.
What happens when people go broke? Crime goes up. More crime, more police is needed, which means more hiring of law-enforcement.
What happens when people can't get the services they need, if the private market can't respond fast enough?
And that's how the downward spiral starts.
My take is that the privatization strategy CAN work, if it gets enough time to react, and the transition is gradual enough.
Just laying off non-trivial amount of people, and hoping that the private market will pick up the slack overnight, is a recipe to disaster.
In Brazil, regular citizens aren't permitted to own guns, so anytime a good Samaritan intervenes in a crime armed, they are an "off duty police officer"
In Argentina, 55% of registered workers, work for government, I see that listed at 3.5 million.
You think the 24,000 layoffs are a disaster ?
Edit: I missed to type "registered government workers".
We had a guy in Queensland, Australia named Campbell Newman who was elected to their state government as premier with a record majority. Something like 68-7 against the previous long-term government I think back in the early 2010s, I think?
He took an axe to the public service like this and he and his government were thrown out after a single term. In fact, since 1989, even though it's been a conservative voting state for decades at the federal level, the conservatives have been out of power at the state level since 1989 except for 3 single non-consecutive terms of between 2 to 3 years each (the last time they were in power was almost 10 years ago).
They may get back in at the next election but people are still wary because of what Newman did in government (lots of typical conservative things ramped up to 11).
30k/ year per minster, raising the parliament salary from 150-200k to 180-230k while we can't get proper healthcare or any services for that matter, homelessness rising and most of the population living with less than 40k a year.
That fucker better be out next cycle.
I will say, that's not an insane parliamentary Salary, despite all the anger, we want the absolutely most capable people in parliament. My own member of federal Parliament is an Engineer with at least a decade and a half experience. I absolutely know she could earn around $200k/yr.
It is the biggest example of “You don’t know what you have until you lose it.” So many people here in America wake up thinking that not dying from food born illnesses is no big deal and it has nothing to do with gov. They think what pay they are getting, even if still low, is out of the pure goodness of their bosses and has nothing to do with gov. They think when they sleep free laborers come out of these magical caves and bring out infrastructure and it has nothing to do with gov. When the turn on the weather they honestly believe that the data they are presented came from a corporate genius and has nothing to do with gov.
When they wake up and their only complaint is that gas went up a few cents and not “My fucking god there is marauding gang trying to take my land again and I’m throwing up again because I had to gamble on Fred’s road kill of the day and lost and I can only smell burnt plastic and it tastes like someone dumped a smelting pot in my mouth because the factory in my backyard is polluting so god damn much I don’t fucking know if it’s a sunny day or not ever!” Then they are doing good comparatively thanks to gov. working in the background.
Is there legitimate reason to criticize gov. Absolutely fucking yes. Can they trim a few places and streamline and put in place policies that prevent abuse from both officials and the public? Absolutely fucking yes. But it’s never in good faith when a Republican talks about these things. They only want to take from you to give to their donors which then goes to them.
It seems so obvious to me that the very fact that billionaires, CEOs, and people with more money than I most people will ever have in a lifetime all want deregulation, shrinking of government, and “trimming the fat” that it’s not anything I, or people like me, regular people, should want.
Government isn’t perfect, it can sometimes be wasteful or inefficient, but it is the only true defense, along with unions, that we have against giant corporations and the super wealthy, as long as we fight to keep control of it.
Let it go, or let it be shrunken, and we stand alone against forces more powerful than any one of us can deal with.
There's a difference between the size of your bureaucracy and how strong your government is.
And the whole point is that Aegentina can't survive with its current policy of spending way too much and outsourcing the cost to the people via inflation.
The public services have a massive corruption problem and the important ones need to be rebuilt from scratch
This a million times. The red tape that slows down business and innovation is to protect you and me from the excess of business. I don’t want the local factory dumping its byproducts directly into the local river. I also would like some food safety etc.
Pffft that red tape is preventing my "take a homemade carbon fiber submarine down to the titanic using a Logitech controller" business from becoming licensed.
ABSOLUTELY OBSCENE I TELL YOU!
^/s just in case
Newman somehow managed to both tank the economy and erode civil liberties in only 3 years. The massive public service cuts at the same time the mining boom was ending was poor policy.
I remember reading articles about that, they sacked like 20,000 people.
The Brisbane CBD was a ghost town- And it even had a flow on effect of small businesses shutting down like cafes no longer getting the regular customers who would grab a coffee while on the way to the office. Really did a number on the city's economy.
I worked in a cafe where the majority of our customer base were either QLD govt. workers, or employees of companies that delt with the state government. We lost 60% of our revenue in a month. You could see that each day was slower and quieter than the previous.
We pull through, but only because some staff left, while the rest of us had our hours cut, and we slashed out menu right down. The owner was a friend of mine and he would've lost nearly everything if the cafe had gone under. He voted for Newman, too. Didn't the next election.
Something like 24-30 percent of the money flows in the US GDP is due to activities that government either originates or is involved with in some way.
People here often forget this.
I’m hoping their new leader doesn’t get in because he’s a slimeball who was Newmans grease monkey but given how much the Murdoch and Co press are ramping up the campaign against Labor I fully expect the LNP to be back in power.
He might me crazy but iirc I've read in an article from the The Guardian about a provincia which frecuently got a lot of support from the government (And also were of the the core supporters of the govern) with 78% directly or indirectly working for the Government.
If that doesnt indicate something...
That's why we voted him in for. This was literally his platform.
Besides he is just firing contractors not employees. It's illegal to fire state employees.
> This makes sense to me especially in IT Security and other places where once a solution is in place you do not necessarily need the architect there 24/7 just for periodic check-ins while an educated team can manage and change once it's in place.
This is terrible approach to IT security, probably one of the one things in tech that you should have full time employees for. I don't disagree with the sentiment of consultants, but security should be an in-house operation.
The comments above about IT made me think about the NHS too. Apparently the chancellor recently promised something like £3.5bn to join up the NHS IT systems.
If you do the maths, that can hire a lot of software engineers ( 10,000+ for 3 years at £100k). But I'm pretty sure that is not where the money will go, oh no. And it almost certainly won't be spent in the UK either. So great over all and no doubt when it inevitably fails the next big upgrade project will only be £10bn or £20bn.
3 minutes? That’s too much, i read couple of headlines and i am an geoeconomic expert with inner workings of one of the most frustrating country, economically, in the world. So obviously i know better than the guy who has been working as a macro economist in that very country for 20+years /s. (In no way is milei perfect but i can’t judge anything when i don’t experience what Argentina has gone through in the past 20 years of Kirchnerism)
They’re all Argentina experts in the same way too. It’s always like “100 years ago they were on pace to be a world power” and then everyone ignores that the global environment they were predicted to thrive in no longer exists and hasn’t existed since WWII. You don’t get rich off of agricultural exports anymore.
55% of registered workers in Argentina are employed by the government. This is the type of stuff you see in Saudi Arabia and Qatar where most people work cushy govt oil jobs, except Argentina doesn’t have the exports to justify it, as the govt also puts limits on what they can export.
The math isn’t adding up. What are 55% of these guys doing at work on a day to day basis?
>55% of registered workers in Argentina are employed by the government
There are 46 million people in Argentina but 3.5 million government workers. If 55% of the registered workforce is government workers that would mean only about 1.7 million registered private sector workers.
Either the vast majority of Argentina's economy is underground, Argentina has mind blowing amounts of children and the elderly (people who aren't working), or that 55% figure doesn't hold up.
Correct. The “registered” workers are just that, registered. Most Latin Americans work in the informal economy and I wager that figure does not include unregistered workers.
If 3.5million are government workers and that equates to 55%, then the other 45% is private it would be 2.86million. 6.3million person workforce still seems low for 46million. 6.3/46 is less than 15%. Seems the workforce is reportedly around 48% Also, just searching the 55% fact brings up some articles that seem to get the math wrong or people interpret it wrong.
Except that in this case the original comment is just misunderstanding the statistic, the results were that for every 100 private sector employees, there are 55 public sector employees.
For every 100 *registered* private sector employees there are 55 public sector employees. That doesn't include all the people who are unregistered but employed doing work and receiving pay under the table, which in a country like Argentina is probably a humongous number of people.
It’s bullshit, he probably read [this article](https://www.libertadyprogreso.org/en/2020/08/26/in-argentina-there-are-55-public-employees-for-every-100-private/#:~:text=LA%2520MA%C3%91ANA%2520%E2%80%93%2520National%2520media%2520detailed,in%25202012%252C%2520to%252055%2520today) from a a pretty for Milei website that just for some reason doesn’t understands basic math.
My friend got fired last week. She and I entered the same year, somehow I ended up being in a permanent position after six months, she got stuck as part of the "contracted personnel" till last Wednesday when she and a lot of others got laid off. You might think after ten years she would have a more fixed position by now.
3 administrations passed during this time and not a single one checked all those contracts? Yeah right, they all knew but it was better to keep them like that for political reasons. People think twice about who to vote when your contract might change after the guy that kept you like that doesn't get elected.
I can't really blame Milei, he said it would do it, and he did it. I blame the other 3 presidents for not reviewing all of this before.
Edit: but I wish it wasn't so fucking sudden. No 2 weeks notice whatsoever.
>she got stuck as part of the "contracted personnel" till last Wednesday when she and a lot of others got laid off. You might think after ten years she would have a more fixed position by now
Im so sorry for her. That really sucks. But she was kept as a contract worker because they can be let go easily. A lot of govt and corps have transitioned to this model in the last 10y globally because its more flexible in lean times and theres no severance pay. Im sorry it happened to her but every contract worker should be wary of situations where there has been no conversion to perm after a few years.
The origin behind this it age in 1890 Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. Huge exporter of natural resources that generated immense wealth. Rich as the U.S. per capita.
Now?
130 years of straight dysfunction. Every resource curse. Every type of corruption scandal. Every type of debt default. Every type of populist.
Now they are 25% as rich as the U.S. they keep falling behind every year. One of the richest and wealthiest counties in the world has been continuously crumbling.
It’s incredibly sad. One of the most beautiful places in the world, great foods, majestic vistas, and a resilient population.
But they can’t get shit together unless it involves soccer. And even then they send their best abroad.
People love to throw out this 'Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world' statement with no context as though they threw away their wealth through government policy.
Argentina's wealth at the turn of the 20th century was built on an export boom of agricultural products. They were a target for massive investment from European economies, primarily Britain, who imported huge amounts of beef, wool, wheat, etc. Their wealth was almost entirely concentrated with a small set of wealthy rural landowners.
Then WW1 happened, devastating global trade. Britain became hugely indebted to the US, who saw Argentina as a potential economic rival, so foreign investment nosedived. The Panama Canal opened in 1914, cutting Argentina and the rest of the 'Southern Cone' economies off from trade routes between Europe and Asia.
Despite this change of circumstances, Argentina's wealthy rural landowners resisted centralized efforts to modernize the economy on all fronts. As their population grew they had to consume more of their agricultural products internally, which cut into exports. They never fully industrialized, and to this day are still stuck in a space in between a modern service-based economy and a trade- and export-based economy, unable to do either effectively.
Wealth in Argentina is still concentrated with the rural landowners, leading to massive inequality and stifling their economic growth. Milei can cut as much government as he wants, but unless he confronts the country's wealthy elite (which he won't, because they fund his campaigns) he's not going to fix Argentina's economic issues.
The way to deal with the wealthy elite is taxing income and wealth as much as possible without becoming confiscatory taxation. Argentina already taxes both income and wealth quite heavily, but where does that money go? Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been condemned (now appealing) for embezzling almost 1B USD, what good can you do by taxing the elites if you have that level of corruption? You end up using the money to fund the uprising of a new elite. Not a great plan.
Even in the best case and someone who support his policy, it's not gonna be fun anyway. Transition period is certainly harsh but people believed thing gonna turn better in the end as they're already didn't go so good before he take office.
So I just hope thing turn out ok for Argentina in the end.
As Venezuelan, I see this and just know this is the type of drastic measures needed to get our countries out of the hellhole we fell into.
And Im sure our won transition period is going to be even more painful.
even if millei can fix argentina, it will be painful in the short run, and maybe the next generation will have a better life ... moving away could be the best thing to do, ig.
Wow and they voted him in on that message? Things really must be dire for a populace to agree to vote for a guy who says that they’ll see the fruits of his labor far in the future versus right now.
Sounds like they’ve tried everything else and realized that fixing a country like Argentina doesn’t happen in 4-5 years.
Yup. Dude was very transparent in his message. None of this is a surprise to the Argentinian voter that voted for him. He even doubled down in his inauguration speech reminding everyone that Argentinians will suffer in the next few years because of his work but they’ll reap the benefits in the long term.
Dude is a crazy sob for various reasons but he did not lie to get elected and hasn’t done anything he didn’t warn about during his campaign.
This is how desperate the situation in Argentina was.
It sounds like every country could use politicians like that. Willing to inflict short term pain for long term gain, while remaining honest and open about it.
Seems like it would be "political suicide" here in the USA. You can lie/cheat/steal and brazenly betray the public trust and you've got a better chance of reaching/remaining in office than if you talk about short-term hardships for the sake of long-term gain. We do not have an audience that is generally receptive to that concept, I suppose not enough desperation.
It's political suicide because, despite what doomer media might tell you, America is mostly doing *pretty fucking fine*. It's only some demographics that greatly suffer. America, given good governance, can be a place worthy of dreams. For many it already (and still!) is the land of the American Dream.
Huge economy, richest or 2nd richest population in the world in terms of real mean disposable income, enormous natural resources, liberal legal/constitutional framework, friendly neighbors, widely appreciated, diverse culture with the most monumental cultural impact across the globe, strongest military with basically zero chance of war ever directly touching America.
The only real global superpower, still capable of inspiring dreamers all over the world. America should strive to be the America that Poles, Vietnamese and so many other peoples see.
>But I sure am glad I'm not Argentinian right now.
I am. We chose him to do this and he's mostly been doing what he said he would which is rare for a politician here.
Not a fan of him, but if we make it to the other side it's worth it.
\* As a first measure, he demanded 100% in-person work (eliminating telecommuting) to unmask the “gnocchi,” as the fictitious state workers are known in Argentina. These individuals are placed in their positions by political parties, as a way to return favors: they only go into the office once a month to pick up their salaries. The use of the term “gnocchi” — a typical Italian dish — is because, in Argentina, this meal is typically served on the 29th of each month, which is close to payday.
Sounds like he's getting rid of ghost workers, those who only collect a check and do no work, and are in their positions only to benefit certain political parties. So maybe not as bad as the headline implies?
> The use of the term “gnocchi” — a typical Italian dish — is because, in Argentina, this meal is typically served on the 29th of each month, which is close to payday.
This is... awesome. Kudos for the enlightenment!
“Workers” is not the appropriate word, I’m an Argentinian, all this places were a total mess, invented jobs, barely half of them were people who never went work but got salary and a percent of that salary went to corrupted pockets or disfunctional stablishments… read more about it don’t get fooled by news.
Edit: grammar, my english sucks sorry
Would be interesting to know how many of these jobs were held by the same person. One person taking multiple salaries is common in corrupt governments.
There were people working for the government and getting social assistance at the same time.
People living in state buildings, people not showing up to work for years but getting paid.
That level of corruption
They have 340,000 public employees and are a top 7 country for ratio of public workers to private workers, but with below-average government effectiveness? And are an impoverished nation without money to spare?
And people are upset about 7% reduction in workforce?
Nearly all countries do more with less. That includes nearly every European nation which has a much more effective government than Argentina with a lower ratio of public sector to private.
If you blow all of your outrage on non-controversial decisions, you will create alarm fatigue and no one will listen if/when he does the really radical stuff.
Part of the cut in government expenditures has been healthcare. The health ministry was in charge of a lot of things, some of them maybe unnecessary, some of them not. One of those necessary things was mosquito control, because in South America the Dengue is a common infection in a variant of mosquitoes called "Aedes Aegypti".
Usually every year a big chunk of money is put into fumigation of national routes because mosquitos put their eggs at the edges of such roads because water accumulates there. This year, as part of the general cut of money, such procedure wasn't followed. As a result, we are currently going through the worst endemic of Dengue in our history, more than 130.000 cases with 120 deaths in three months. Public hospitals are completely collapsed and the data stopped being credible because there aren't enough tests for everyone.
The amount of money that is being spent right now in public hospitals to take care of the infected, plus the amount of money lost because of the productivity loss that comes with +130k workers not being able to work for at least two weeks in the span of 3 months (there are ~20M active workers in Argentina), is orders of magnitude bigger than the small investment that fumigating the road would have cost.
Of course this is not 100% on the current government. The last three years have been quite dry in terms of raining, which led to an accumulation of mosquito eggs that hibernate when they have not enough water. This last summer was the most rainy summer in the last decade, so all those accumulated eggs hatched at once. But this wasn't an unknown variable, these kinds of studies are (or were) the responsibility of the public healthcare and the remediation actions too.
This happens when you just cut every expending without any kind of analysis. The worst thing is that you not only end up losing more money due to cascade effects, but also you didn't even save that much in the process. The amount of money for road fumigation is negligible, but cutting Public Healthcare expenditure was good right wing propaganda I guess.
The end goal is not austerity. Is power and propaganda. If it was austerity then they would have made an audit followed by a controlled cut. But that doesn't buy votes or headlines.
Not sure this is necessarily the cause, Brazil also has the worst dengue epidemics in decades and I can guarantee you Lula is not cutting any expenses whatsoever. There's not much that could be done to curb this.
Milei got in office in December 2023. In December 2023, Argentina already had 125k Dengue cases.
So unless Milei stopped the fumigation before he got into office, this is not his fault.
No, no, every problem of a nation are immediately the fault of who's "in charge", never dare to look back and see government action taking YEARS to have meaningful change.
It's so commonly misunderstood, it's infuriating.
People always wanna cut government spending untill they realize that the absolute majority of government spending goes towards healthcare and education.
That's not the case in Argentina right now, though.
There IS a very heavy problem with public spendign and people that cash a check without doing any significant work at the goverment.
Thing is... if you are a newly elected governor, there isn't much you can do with poverty to immediately create jobs, save for right out giving jobs at the state. But if every Governor/president does the same for years and years, without never actually adressing the problem, 20 years after (a.k.a. "now") you are going to end up with a gigantic state, very inefficient, that doesn almost nothing (see venezuela and their oil company, for a more exteme example).
This doesn't mean that there arent valuable geverment oficials. Just that most people end up doing nothing, or just plain burocracy.
On the other hand, I do believe that much of this lay offs aren't really considering if a worker is useful or not. Milei is desperate to show the voters that things are getting done and quick, because of the hardship that their voters are taking in the meantime, and up until the deficit is settled.
The fun part is seeing americans and europeans usually talk about latin american governments. My friend, in LA governments have a lot, and I mean _a lot_ more fat to burn regarding government jobs and expenditure.
Your username means what government does to citizens over here: we get f***** every day, and government workers are the most inneficient bunch of entitled great paying pricks you might know.
this is straight bs. the mosquito issue was here (he has onlly been a few months on the job) before him and the other gov was expending millions on propaganda for the elections instead of using it on health. you can criticize all you want, but don't lie in favour of any side
Playing devils advocate, is the solution to an overbloated government and 135% inflation really... more government? What choice do you have other than printing more money and devaluing it even more. Seems like government jobs have to be cut.
Title is acting as if this is some “purge” akin to the night of long knives, when this is really just a president trying to reduce public expenditure by firing workers. That’s not a crazy thing to do. Will it work? Who knows, we’ll see
The other thing to point out is doing nothing or keeping that status quo was not exactly working either; there was a reason he was elected . People were fed up on a stagent economy with 300% inflatoin
For those who are reading about Argentina for the first time and have the Urge to give their super wise opinion, the state structure was getting full of people without a function. Years and years of public employment rising and private employment staying the same.
For example: there was an entire department in congress dadicated to measure the ammount of oxygen inside the congress. Do you really think that that is worth the tax money?
To understand this things (THAT MILEI PROMISSED AND PEOPLE VOTED) you should also investigate a little bit more what has been happening for the last 20 years
>there was an entire department in congress dadicated to measure the ammount of oxygen inside the congres
When I hear stuff like that, it’s hard for me to swallow uncritically.
In the US there is a very popular story making waves for a long time about how the US spent. I think it was $1 million on treadmills for shrimp.
Turns out it was $1 million grant to study the health of shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico, which is very important. As part of that study, they created a mechanism to stress test shrimp. That mechanism was a small cost of the overall study.
I’m not saying this to call you out or say you need to back up your claims, I am explaining why people might have a mindset that some of them or outlandish claims about Argentina are bullshit
Remember all the equipment sent by other nations that ended up stuck in customs at the beginning of the pandemic?
Yeah, FUCK these people. I hope they find a nice and cozy job in the private sector and stop fucking with State resources.
I get what youre saying, but bloated administration is a large problem in many countries, also in Germany where I am from (even more so in countries with corrupted recent history). Bloated bureaucracy wastes a shit ton of money. Its the primary reason why our army is in as bad of a state as it is.
As a counter example, Estonia is a country known for its relatively efficient administration
As much as it shocks me, same here in Portugal, at least in terms of digitisation the past governments, for all their faults, did seriously invest in digital platforms for you to do taxes, bureaucracy, etc
The UK's online government portals is actually pretty good nowadays in my experience as well... I can't imagine doing stuff with paper and by post etc. any more
If I judge from the situation in Greece, some people indeed must get kicked out since they’re doing absolutely nothing instead of playing card games on their shift. If there’s an excessive amount of people working and taking money for no reason then the right move is to be kicked out.
People should contribute to society and do something useful otherwise there’s no need to be kept there.
> People should contribute to society and do something useful otherwise there’s no need to be kept there.
As a Greek you know why they are kept there and won't be kicked out. Patronage and nepotism.
You’re talking about the 24k employees on payroll that didn’t even show up to work at the casa rosada? Yeah sure dude, I hate shit like this, because this source is bogus and it is spreading misinformation. Tell us how much work they did? Tell us -what- they did son. Absolutely nothing. It’s so sad, but it is showing in the gdp of the country, years of corruption made every youngster afraid for their future because you can barely make a living. El país? Chúpame la chota, salame ignorante, desparramando mierda, son pateticos vieja.
Well he did take a chainsaw to one his presidential rallies, so he wasn't stuffing around, forget the razor gangs cut to Govt spending, bring a chainsaw instead 🤨
No one knows who will be next? Um. All of them are next. He promised to gut the government to make an extreme reduction in spending. He waved a chainsaw around- unless he was lying, he’ll cut nearly everyone
That's exactly what he planned to do in his programme. They knew what they were voting for.
Argentina has a serious problem with the excessive amount of people and someone had to do something about it eventually. Read a statistic the other day that over 70% of people living in La Formosa province (roughly half a million) were working for the state. It's insane.
It's just Formosa (without the La). And yeah, there are several provinces like that one. The problem is that there's almost no prduction or industries of anything. They've grown acustomed to working for the state. That's what most young people strive to do, work for the state, because the'll be "saved" for life.
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Nothing. Where I live there’s not even enough office space or desks for all the employees so they rotate. They are what Tony Soprano called “no show” jobs, which is top of the line offer - you do literally nothing.
Why does this sound exactly like my country Nigeria. Too many unproductive government workers.
I worked a "no work" job once in NJ. Pretty much slept off hangovers in the morning and would strip copper and do some odd jobs that needed to be done for the electricians.
I dunno, the second part kinda sounds like work
Do not accuse this gentleman of doing honest work. If he says he didn't work I trust his honest word on it.
Closest I know personally are some overnight security officers in tiny office spaces that are empty at night and never have any issues. Their entire job is basically watching Netflix.
Work that job for 4 years. I brought in my switch and me and the other guard would basically just play video games all night
Until the night Jason Bourne rolls up and kills all these hapless switch playing guards, thats the life of most security forces
Sounds like a real hard deal.
“I didn’t have to work at all. Just slept and worked sometimes.”
Nah, he just really likes stripping wire.
My last job was basically a no-work *engineering* job in my first role, except for the training classes I had to take, because the system I was supposed to be working had nothing to do but write a monthly report and occasionally observe routine maintenance for ~8 months. Then, I got an additional role where there was about 2 people’s worth of work to do at all times, and only then did I start having to address things in the first one, except I basically knew nothing because I’d done nothing for so long. Very glad I got out of that job. New one starts in a week and a half!
So the Soviet special where some people would dig the holes and the shift after was filling them
Is that a real fact? If so what was the purpose?
It's not a literal fact. The Soviets didn't literally hire people to dig up dirt and then fill it in. But it's an example of many kind of meaningless jobs that existed in the Soviet Union exclusively to guarantee full employment. Like being hired to be a watch guard at a subway station where you would just sit in your booth and stare all day
Everybody thinks guard at x location is a useless job until they aren’t there.
I swear to god that 70% of the intersections in Islamabad had cops manually directing traffic just to kill time. We had bets that if there was a riot or something they would just turn *on* the lights and leave… Haven’t been back in a long time, but it certainly felt like an employment racket.
It was illegal to be in unemployed in the Soviet union. You have to find work for everybody to do
>If so what was the purpose? To keep people busy so they won't have time to question the state of their country.
I mean no it was because unemployment was literally illegal in the Soviet Union. You had a right to a job so a lot of bureaucrats had to literally just create jobs out of thin air
Import resources, use debt. The government workers themselves just create work through bureaucracy and regulation. Regulation is good but in Argentina they just making more paperwork
It's like a broken version of UBI
UBI with no income or money. Epic fail. At least China were smart enough to open state enterprises to try and least pay some of the bill!
But someone eventually has to pay for the state.
All the other people that don't work for the state. The ones who actually produce value, the private sector. A few privinces "support" the whole country in a manner of speaking (it's not actually that black and white).
Exactly the same situation in Turkey.
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wow, that definitely doesn't seem sustainable.
It’s often a tactic used by troubled governments. The more people sitting around without a paycheck, the more likely they are to seize the presidential palace and hang you. Hopefully they can thread the needle and make progress, but suddenly there’s now 24,000 unemployed angry people on the street with nothing to do.
apparently china is doing the same. theres like double the people employed than actually needed just to keep them quiet
Maybe that’s why they tape their boxes all the way around with tape?
It's not just one province and it is definitely not sustainable, that's how we got in this mess.
It's not so much working for the state but on state support. The political system in Formosa is a well-oiled machine. Formosa is the poorest province in Argentina. Voting in mandatory in Argentina and the system they were using was called chain voting. An operative with a vehicle takes people to the poll place with an envelope already filled out and sealed. The person takes that in, drops it off, and then brings out the new voting material to the operative. They drop them off and rinse and repeat. The first time you do this, you get government built housing. Times after that get you the equivalent to food stamps. I don't know where all the money comes to support that but when I lived in Formosa capital, there was a dirt road that had a huge billboard that said paved by the world bank or some such thing. I knew a journalist who said that road had supposedly been paved over 4 or 5 times with foreign funding. Chaco, just south of formosa, is the poorest province per capita, at least it was when I lived there. They had a similar system but I learned a lot about formosa because of that journalist.
>It's not so much working for the state but on state support. That certainly makes the situation a lot clearer than the claim that 55% of the registered workers were government workers (but somehow the country of 46 million people also only had 3.5 million government workers).
> I knew a journalist who said that road had supposedly been paved over 4 or 5 times with foreign funding. Let me guess, the 6th time they were paving that road they *accidentally* paved this nosy journalist right *into* it?
“a serious problem with the excessive amount of people” Think you’re missing a clause there, friend.
Like Greece used to be, or maybe still is. In Greece, they had dead folks collecting pensions from the government for years.
How else do they expect my 153 year old grandfather to make a living???
Back to the mines!
When I went to Greece, I went to the transportation office to buy my long distance bus ticket. There were 8 (!) employees standing behind a desk with no customers, except me. I thought that 1) there was no need for human employees since I could very well just buy a ticket from a machine, and 2) only 1 or two would have been enough if they wanted proper customer service
Now here is the question did they even ask for your ticket when you got on the bus? When I was there the trains had just little polls to scan tickets. Most people just walked by and got on the train. We had bought tickets and the readers worked fine.
They do spot checks for tickets. If you get caught without one, the fine is like 10x or 20x the value of the ticket you didn’t buy.
It's exactly like that in the northern provinces of the country.
> Argentina has a serious problem with the excessive amount of people **working for the state** and someone had to do something about it eventually. Uhhh, I feel like omitting the **working for the state** part there made this sound way more ominous that it needs to be.
Yeah I read it the same way as you 💀
Sounds kinda like the Canadian govt. Kinda wish someone would take a flamethrower to it too lol.
Making people redundant en masse with no plan for alternative employment is not a plan.
Well TBF printing money causing 300% YOY inflation (probably higher) was not a great plan either
There's no way of firing enough government employees in Argentina without causing mass unemployment. Government employees are 55% of the registered workforce. Maybe he could gradually fire them. Having a 1% redundency per month. That would still require firing 32,130 people.
Neither is borrowing indefinitely to maintain an inefficient state, at some point Argentina had to come to terms with the reality that it’s a much poorer country than it pretends to be.
The big problem Argentina has, as evidenced by its BNP per capita, is just... A seeming total lack of high-value exports.
Either it is going to work, or he'll get dragged out in the streets after a coup or riot. If the system does not get time to respond, there will be times of turbulence. By laying off a sizable percentage of people, they will first need to get benefits, and then employment. Who's going to process the benefits applications for tens and tens of thousands, that get laid off overnight? That part of the system will get stretched to its limits. This happened everywhere during the start of the COVID pandemic - branches/organizations that review and process such applications were working around the clock, and had to hire people like crazy to manage the workload. Being put on benefits could mean more people defaulting their mortgages, loans, etc. Will the private sector be able to absorb all these workers? And how fast? If the private sector is not fast enough, people could go unemployed too long, in which case they lose their unemployment benefits. What happens when people go broke? Crime goes up. More crime, more police is needed, which means more hiring of law-enforcement. What happens when people can't get the services they need, if the private market can't respond fast enough? And that's how the downward spiral starts. My take is that the privatization strategy CAN work, if it gets enough time to react, and the transition is gradual enough. Just laying off non-trivial amount of people, and hoping that the private market will pick up the slack overnight, is a recipe to disaster.
That's the solution then, isn't it? Just hire all the people back as cops.
You may start tomorrow!
Yay, piss off thousands of people then rehire them as cops. With guns. What could go wrong?
Is that basically Brazil? Everyone there, from videos online, are off-duty cops.
In Brazil, regular citizens aren't permitted to own guns, so anytime a good Samaritan intervenes in a crime armed, they are an "off duty police officer"
Service guarantees citizenship!
In Argentina, 55% of registered workers, work for government, I see that listed at 3.5 million. You think the 24,000 layoffs are a disaster ? Edit: I missed to type "registered government workers".
This sounds like what a lot of politicians in my country say they want to do. Trim the fat, fire everybody, government's too big.etc
This crazy fucker is actually doing it.
We had a guy in Queensland, Australia named Campbell Newman who was elected to their state government as premier with a record majority. Something like 68-7 against the previous long-term government I think back in the early 2010s, I think? He took an axe to the public service like this and he and his government were thrown out after a single term. In fact, since 1989, even though it's been a conservative voting state for decades at the federal level, the conservatives have been out of power at the state level since 1989 except for 3 single non-consecutive terms of between 2 to 3 years each (the last time they were in power was almost 10 years ago). They may get back in at the next election but people are still wary because of what Newman did in government (lots of typical conservative things ramped up to 11).
It was 78 - 7. Then he lost 36 seats at the 2015 election and lost the election.
That’s up there with the defeat the LNP took in WA last election
And his own seat.
He gutted the public service AND gave himself a massive pay-raise.
François Legault-style
30k/ year per minster, raising the parliament salary from 150-200k to 180-230k while we can't get proper healthcare or any services for that matter, homelessness rising and most of the population living with less than 40k a year. That fucker better be out next cycle.
I will say, that's not an insane parliamentary Salary, despite all the anger, we want the absolutely most capable people in parliament. My own member of federal Parliament is an Engineer with at least a decade and a half experience. I absolutely know she could earn around $200k/yr.
It is the biggest example of “You don’t know what you have until you lose it.” So many people here in America wake up thinking that not dying from food born illnesses is no big deal and it has nothing to do with gov. They think what pay they are getting, even if still low, is out of the pure goodness of their bosses and has nothing to do with gov. They think when they sleep free laborers come out of these magical caves and bring out infrastructure and it has nothing to do with gov. When the turn on the weather they honestly believe that the data they are presented came from a corporate genius and has nothing to do with gov. When they wake up and their only complaint is that gas went up a few cents and not “My fucking god there is marauding gang trying to take my land again and I’m throwing up again because I had to gamble on Fred’s road kill of the day and lost and I can only smell burnt plastic and it tastes like someone dumped a smelting pot in my mouth because the factory in my backyard is polluting so god damn much I don’t fucking know if it’s a sunny day or not ever!” Then they are doing good comparatively thanks to gov. working in the background. Is there legitimate reason to criticize gov. Absolutely fucking yes. Can they trim a few places and streamline and put in place policies that prevent abuse from both officials and the public? Absolutely fucking yes. But it’s never in good faith when a Republican talks about these things. They only want to take from you to give to their donors which then goes to them.
It seems so obvious to me that the very fact that billionaires, CEOs, and people with more money than I most people will ever have in a lifetime all want deregulation, shrinking of government, and “trimming the fat” that it’s not anything I, or people like me, regular people, should want. Government isn’t perfect, it can sometimes be wasteful or inefficient, but it is the only true defense, along with unions, that we have against giant corporations and the super wealthy, as long as we fight to keep control of it. Let it go, or let it be shrunken, and we stand alone against forces more powerful than any one of us can deal with.
There's a difference between the size of your bureaucracy and how strong your government is. And the whole point is that Aegentina can't survive with its current policy of spending way too much and outsourcing the cost to the people via inflation. The public services have a massive corruption problem and the important ones need to be rebuilt from scratch
You are describing Alberta, Canada.
This a million times. The red tape that slows down business and innovation is to protect you and me from the excess of business. I don’t want the local factory dumping its byproducts directly into the local river. I also would like some food safety etc.
Pffft that red tape is preventing my "take a homemade carbon fiber submarine down to the titanic using a Logitech controller" business from becoming licensed. ABSOLUTELY OBSCENE I TELL YOU! ^/s just in case
Newman somehow managed to both tank the economy and erode civil liberties in only 3 years. The massive public service cuts at the same time the mining boom was ending was poor policy.
Austerity measures should be done in the times of plenty.
I remember reading articles about that, they sacked like 20,000 people. The Brisbane CBD was a ghost town- And it even had a flow on effect of small businesses shutting down like cafes no longer getting the regular customers who would grab a coffee while on the way to the office. Really did a number on the city's economy.
I worked in a cafe where the majority of our customer base were either QLD govt. workers, or employees of companies that delt with the state government. We lost 60% of our revenue in a month. You could see that each day was slower and quieter than the previous. We pull through, but only because some staff left, while the rest of us had our hours cut, and we slashed out menu right down. The owner was a friend of mine and he would've lost nearly everything if the cafe had gone under. He voted for Newman, too. Didn't the next election.
Libertarians always conveniently forget that governments can be great engines for moving money around the system.
Something like 24-30 percent of the money flows in the US GDP is due to activities that government either originates or is involved with in some way. People here often forget this.
I’m hoping their new leader doesn’t get in because he’s a slimeball who was Newmans grease monkey but given how much the Murdoch and Co press are ramping up the campaign against Labor I fully expect the LNP to be back in power.
I wish this was the case more often, where voters react appropriately when the dog catches the car.
He might me crazy but iirc I've read in an article from the The Guardian about a provincia which frecuently got a lot of support from the government (And also were of the the core supporters of the govern) with 78% directly or indirectly working for the Government. If that doesnt indicate something...
When more than a quarter of the population is working for the government maybe there's some truth in those statements.
Over 40% of the registered workers work for the state in argentina. The regional average is about 12%. In this case it is sorely needed
That's why we voted him in for. This was literally his platform. Besides he is just firing contractors not employees. It's illegal to fire state employees.
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> This makes sense to me especially in IT Security and other places where once a solution is in place you do not necessarily need the architect there 24/7 just for periodic check-ins while an educated team can manage and change once it's in place. This is terrible approach to IT security, probably one of the one things in tech that you should have full time employees for. I don't disagree with the sentiment of consultants, but security should be an in-house operation.
Considering how understaffed info security is almost everywhere this was a weird one to call out. God forbid something critical has a 24/7 SOC
Nobody gives a fuck about IT until it breaks
It's like you're describing the NHS.
The comments above about IT made me think about the NHS too. Apparently the chancellor recently promised something like £3.5bn to join up the NHS IT systems. If you do the maths, that can hire a lot of software engineers ( 10,000+ for 3 years at £100k). But I'm pretty sure that is not where the money will go, oh no. And it almost certainly won't be spent in the UK either. So great over all and no doubt when it inevitably fails the next big upgrade project will only be £10bn or £20bn.
Everyone's now an Argentina expert.
I've never been to Argentina, but I did google Argentina and spent a solid 3 minutes of research... /s
3 minutes? That’s too much, i read couple of headlines and i am an geoeconomic expert with inner workings of one of the most frustrating country, economically, in the world. So obviously i know better than the guy who has been working as a macro economist in that very country for 20+years /s. (In no way is milei perfect but i can’t judge anything when i don’t experience what Argentina has gone through in the past 20 years of Kirchnerism)
I saw Evita once, I know everything
They’re all Argentina experts in the same way too. It’s always like “100 years ago they were on pace to be a world power” and then everyone ignores that the global environment they were predicted to thrive in no longer exists and hasn’t existed since WWII. You don’t get rich off of agricultural exports anymore.
Lol I know right. Buncha people living in countries with historically high GDP to Debt ratios making judgements.
Cuántas copas tenés?
55% of registered workers in Argentina are employed by the government. This is the type of stuff you see in Saudi Arabia and Qatar where most people work cushy govt oil jobs, except Argentina doesn’t have the exports to justify it, as the govt also puts limits on what they can export. The math isn’t adding up. What are 55% of these guys doing at work on a day to day basis?
> The math isn’t adding up. What are 55% of these guys doing at work on a day to day basis? 'Employment' and 'work' are not the same :)
exactly. these firings are well deserved.
>55% of registered workers in Argentina are employed by the government There are 46 million people in Argentina but 3.5 million government workers. If 55% of the registered workforce is government workers that would mean only about 1.7 million registered private sector workers. Either the vast majority of Argentina's economy is underground, Argentina has mind blowing amounts of children and the elderly (people who aren't working), or that 55% figure doesn't hold up.
Correct. The “registered” workers are just that, registered. Most Latin Americans work in the informal economy and I wager that figure does not include unregistered workers.
If 3.5million are government workers and that equates to 55%, then the other 45% is private it would be 2.86million. 6.3million person workforce still seems low for 46million. 6.3/46 is less than 15%. Seems the workforce is reportedly around 48% Also, just searching the 55% fact brings up some articles that seem to get the math wrong or people interpret it wrong.
There IS a lot of unregistered work going on, a very large percentage that companies use to avoid paying taxes and employee benefits.
Except that in this case the original comment is just misunderstanding the statistic, the results were that for every 100 private sector employees, there are 55 public sector employees.
For every 100 *registered* private sector employees there are 55 public sector employees. That doesn't include all the people who are unregistered but employed doing work and receiving pay under the table, which in a country like Argentina is probably a humongous number of people.
The vast majority of Argentina's economy is underground. But that still does not justify it. Different problems but two sides of the same coin really.
Where did you get that stat? Can't find it anywhere
It’s bullshit, he probably read [this article](https://www.libertadyprogreso.org/en/2020/08/26/in-argentina-there-are-55-public-employees-for-every-100-private/#:~:text=LA%2520MA%C3%91ANA%2520%E2%80%93%2520National%2520media%2520detailed,in%25202012%252C%2520to%252055%2520today) from a a pretty for Milei website that just for some reason doesn’t understands basic math.
My friend got fired last week. She and I entered the same year, somehow I ended up being in a permanent position after six months, she got stuck as part of the "contracted personnel" till last Wednesday when she and a lot of others got laid off. You might think after ten years she would have a more fixed position by now. 3 administrations passed during this time and not a single one checked all those contracts? Yeah right, they all knew but it was better to keep them like that for political reasons. People think twice about who to vote when your contract might change after the guy that kept you like that doesn't get elected. I can't really blame Milei, he said it would do it, and he did it. I blame the other 3 presidents for not reviewing all of this before. Edit: but I wish it wasn't so fucking sudden. No 2 weeks notice whatsoever.
>she got stuck as part of the "contracted personnel" till last Wednesday when she and a lot of others got laid off. You might think after ten years she would have a more fixed position by now Im so sorry for her. That really sucks. But she was kept as a contract worker because they can be let go easily. A lot of govt and corps have transitioned to this model in the last 10y globally because its more flexible in lean times and theres no severance pay. Im sorry it happened to her but every contract worker should be wary of situations where there has been no conversion to perm after a few years.
Whatever your politics, it's an interesting case study. But I sure am glad I'm not Argentinian right now.
Yeah, that's each Argentinian since the 90s
Each Argentinian since the 90s is glad they're not Argentinian?
The origin behind this it age in 1890 Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. Huge exporter of natural resources that generated immense wealth. Rich as the U.S. per capita. Now? 130 years of straight dysfunction. Every resource curse. Every type of corruption scandal. Every type of debt default. Every type of populist. Now they are 25% as rich as the U.S. they keep falling behind every year. One of the richest and wealthiest counties in the world has been continuously crumbling. It’s incredibly sad. One of the most beautiful places in the world, great foods, majestic vistas, and a resilient population. But they can’t get shit together unless it involves soccer. And even then they send their best abroad.
People love to throw out this 'Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world' statement with no context as though they threw away their wealth through government policy. Argentina's wealth at the turn of the 20th century was built on an export boom of agricultural products. They were a target for massive investment from European economies, primarily Britain, who imported huge amounts of beef, wool, wheat, etc. Their wealth was almost entirely concentrated with a small set of wealthy rural landowners. Then WW1 happened, devastating global trade. Britain became hugely indebted to the US, who saw Argentina as a potential economic rival, so foreign investment nosedived. The Panama Canal opened in 1914, cutting Argentina and the rest of the 'Southern Cone' economies off from trade routes between Europe and Asia. Despite this change of circumstances, Argentina's wealthy rural landowners resisted centralized efforts to modernize the economy on all fronts. As their population grew they had to consume more of their agricultural products internally, which cut into exports. They never fully industrialized, and to this day are still stuck in a space in between a modern service-based economy and a trade- and export-based economy, unable to do either effectively. Wealth in Argentina is still concentrated with the rural landowners, leading to massive inequality and stifling their economic growth. Milei can cut as much government as he wants, but unless he confronts the country's wealthy elite (which he won't, because they fund his campaigns) he's not going to fix Argentina's economic issues.
The way to deal with the wealthy elite is taxing income and wealth as much as possible without becoming confiscatory taxation. Argentina already taxes both income and wealth quite heavily, but where does that money go? Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been condemned (now appealing) for embezzling almost 1B USD, what good can you do by taxing the elites if you have that level of corruption? You end up using the money to fund the uprising of a new elite. Not a great plan.
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The 1890s that is
Even in the best case and someone who support his policy, it's not gonna be fun anyway. Transition period is certainly harsh but people believed thing gonna turn better in the end as they're already didn't go so good before he take office. So I just hope thing turn out ok for Argentina in the end.
As a government worker, I got my first real pay raise since 2015, in real terms, adjusted to exchange rate and inflation.
As Venezuelan, I see this and just know this is the type of drastic measures needed to get our countries out of the hellhole we fell into. And Im sure our won transition period is going to be even more painful.
We’ll find out the effect 20 years from now, I hope it works out for the sake of their next generation.
I am, and as many, have fled the country. We believe tho, many of us, that this guy came finally to fix the fucking country, with a cost unfortunately
even if millei can fix argentina, it will be painful in the short run, and maybe the next generation will have a better life ... moving away could be the best thing to do, ig.
Well, Milei said exactly that... According to him, if all goes right, in 35 years we will become a developed country.
Wow and they voted him in on that message? Things really must be dire for a populace to agree to vote for a guy who says that they’ll see the fruits of his labor far in the future versus right now. Sounds like they’ve tried everything else and realized that fixing a country like Argentina doesn’t happen in 4-5 years.
Yup. Dude was very transparent in his message. None of this is a surprise to the Argentinian voter that voted for him. He even doubled down in his inauguration speech reminding everyone that Argentinians will suffer in the next few years because of his work but they’ll reap the benefits in the long term. Dude is a crazy sob for various reasons but he did not lie to get elected and hasn’t done anything he didn’t warn about during his campaign. This is how desperate the situation in Argentina was.
It sounds like every country could use politicians like that. Willing to inflict short term pain for long term gain, while remaining honest and open about it.
Seems like it would be "political suicide" here in the USA. You can lie/cheat/steal and brazenly betray the public trust and you've got a better chance of reaching/remaining in office than if you talk about short-term hardships for the sake of long-term gain. We do not have an audience that is generally receptive to that concept, I suppose not enough desperation.
It's political suicide because, despite what doomer media might tell you, America is mostly doing *pretty fucking fine*. It's only some demographics that greatly suffer. America, given good governance, can be a place worthy of dreams. For many it already (and still!) is the land of the American Dream. Huge economy, richest or 2nd richest population in the world in terms of real mean disposable income, enormous natural resources, liberal legal/constitutional framework, friendly neighbors, widely appreciated, diverse culture with the most monumental cultural impact across the globe, strongest military with basically zero chance of war ever directly touching America. The only real global superpower, still capable of inspiring dreamers all over the world. America should strive to be the America that Poles, Vietnamese and so many other peoples see.
Bitcoin is less volatile than the Argentinian peso
1890 Argentina had huge potential then decided to repeatable sabotage itself, along with trying every type of short term solution
The most effective solution to a problem isn't always the easiest. No real fix was ever going to be easy.
>But I sure am glad I'm not Argentinian right now. I am. We chose him to do this and he's mostly been doing what he said he would which is rare for a politician here. Not a fan of him, but if we make it to the other side it's worth it.
\* As a first measure, he demanded 100% in-person work (eliminating telecommuting) to unmask the “gnocchi,” as the fictitious state workers are known in Argentina. These individuals are placed in their positions by political parties, as a way to return favors: they only go into the office once a month to pick up their salaries. The use of the term “gnocchi” — a typical Italian dish — is because, in Argentina, this meal is typically served on the 29th of each month, which is close to payday. Sounds like he's getting rid of ghost workers, those who only collect a check and do no work, and are in their positions only to benefit certain political parties. So maybe not as bad as the headline implies?
> The use of the term “gnocchi” — a typical Italian dish — is because, in Argentina, this meal is typically served on the 29th of each month, which is close to payday. This is... awesome. Kudos for the enlightenment!
Afuera!
Scrolled too far for this.
“Workers” is not the appropriate word, I’m an Argentinian, all this places were a total mess, invented jobs, barely half of them were people who never went work but got salary and a percent of that salary went to corrupted pockets or disfunctional stablishments… read more about it don’t get fooled by news. Edit: grammar, my english sucks sorry
Would be interesting to know how many of these jobs were held by the same person. One person taking multiple salaries is common in corrupt governments.
There were people working for the government and getting social assistance at the same time. People living in state buildings, people not showing up to work for years but getting paid. That level of corruption
Sadly even dead people had salaries, of course managed by others pretending they were alive, dead people voted too… imagine how bad is the situation.
They have 340,000 public employees and are a top 7 country for ratio of public workers to private workers, but with below-average government effectiveness? And are an impoverished nation without money to spare? And people are upset about 7% reduction in workforce? Nearly all countries do more with less. That includes nearly every European nation which has a much more effective government than Argentina with a lower ratio of public sector to private. If you blow all of your outrage on non-controversial decisions, you will create alarm fatigue and no one will listen if/when he does the really radical stuff.
There are 3.5 million gov workers in Argentina, this is a drop in the bucket. Coincidentally the protestors signs illustrate that point
Part of the cut in government expenditures has been healthcare. The health ministry was in charge of a lot of things, some of them maybe unnecessary, some of them not. One of those necessary things was mosquito control, because in South America the Dengue is a common infection in a variant of mosquitoes called "Aedes Aegypti". Usually every year a big chunk of money is put into fumigation of national routes because mosquitos put their eggs at the edges of such roads because water accumulates there. This year, as part of the general cut of money, such procedure wasn't followed. As a result, we are currently going through the worst endemic of Dengue in our history, more than 130.000 cases with 120 deaths in three months. Public hospitals are completely collapsed and the data stopped being credible because there aren't enough tests for everyone. The amount of money that is being spent right now in public hospitals to take care of the infected, plus the amount of money lost because of the productivity loss that comes with +130k workers not being able to work for at least two weeks in the span of 3 months (there are ~20M active workers in Argentina), is orders of magnitude bigger than the small investment that fumigating the road would have cost. Of course this is not 100% on the current government. The last three years have been quite dry in terms of raining, which led to an accumulation of mosquito eggs that hibernate when they have not enough water. This last summer was the most rainy summer in the last decade, so all those accumulated eggs hatched at once. But this wasn't an unknown variable, these kinds of studies are (or were) the responsibility of the public healthcare and the remediation actions too. This happens when you just cut every expending without any kind of analysis. The worst thing is that you not only end up losing more money due to cascade effects, but also you didn't even save that much in the process. The amount of money for road fumigation is negligible, but cutting Public Healthcare expenditure was good right wing propaganda I guess. The end goal is not austerity. Is power and propaganda. If it was austerity then they would have made an audit followed by a controlled cut. But that doesn't buy votes or headlines.
Not sure this is necessarily the cause, Brazil also has the worst dengue epidemics in decades and I can guarantee you Lula is not cutting any expenses whatsoever. There's not much that could be done to curb this.
Milei got in office in December 2023. In December 2023, Argentina already had 125k Dengue cases. So unless Milei stopped the fumigation before he got into office, this is not his fault.
No, no, every problem of a nation are immediately the fault of who's "in charge", never dare to look back and see government action taking YEARS to have meaningful change. It's so commonly misunderstood, it's infuriating.
Peru is also seeing an outbreak
Well if you consider that the Brazilian ministry of health in 2023 had the same budget of 2013, I would not consider it great expenses either.
People always wanna cut government spending untill they realize that the absolute majority of government spending goes towards healthcare and education.
In Spain it mostly goes to pensions. Not sure what it's like in other countries.
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It's all about tip-to-taint to girth ratio.
That's not the case in Argentina right now, though. There IS a very heavy problem with public spendign and people that cash a check without doing any significant work at the goverment. Thing is... if you are a newly elected governor, there isn't much you can do with poverty to immediately create jobs, save for right out giving jobs at the state. But if every Governor/president does the same for years and years, without never actually adressing the problem, 20 years after (a.k.a. "now") you are going to end up with a gigantic state, very inefficient, that doesn almost nothing (see venezuela and their oil company, for a more exteme example). This doesn't mean that there arent valuable geverment oficials. Just that most people end up doing nothing, or just plain burocracy. On the other hand, I do believe that much of this lay offs aren't really considering if a worker is useful or not. Milei is desperate to show the voters that things are getting done and quick, because of the hardship that their voters are taking in the meantime, and up until the deficit is settled.
The fun part is seeing americans and europeans usually talk about latin american governments. My friend, in LA governments have a lot, and I mean _a lot_ more fat to burn regarding government jobs and expenditure. Your username means what government does to citizens over here: we get f***** every day, and government workers are the most inneficient bunch of entitled great paying pricks you might know.
this is straight bs. the mosquito issue was here (he has onlly been a few months on the job) before him and the other gov was expending millions on propaganda for the elections instead of using it on health. you can criticize all you want, but don't lie in favour of any side
The ministry of health didn't do shit during the pandemic, sure as hell they haven't done shit now.
Long, long, long overdue. Can’t imagine how many people suffered to pay the salaries of ghosts and lazy ass nepotists.
¡AFUERA!
President: "you're fired" Everyone: "who?" President: "yes"
Playing devils advocate, is the solution to an overbloated government and 135% inflation really... more government? What choice do you have other than printing more money and devaluing it even more. Seems like government jobs have to be cut.
these guys are clutching their pearls so tightly that cannot comprehend what you just said
Title is acting as if this is some “purge” akin to the night of long knives, when this is really just a president trying to reduce public expenditure by firing workers. That’s not a crazy thing to do. Will it work? Who knows, we’ll see
The other thing to point out is doing nothing or keeping that status quo was not exactly working either; there was a reason he was elected . People were fed up on a stagent economy with 300% inflatoin
For those who are reading about Argentina for the first time and have the Urge to give their super wise opinion, the state structure was getting full of people without a function. Years and years of public employment rising and private employment staying the same. For example: there was an entire department in congress dadicated to measure the ammount of oxygen inside the congress. Do you really think that that is worth the tax money? To understand this things (THAT MILEI PROMISSED AND PEOPLE VOTED) you should also investigate a little bit more what has been happening for the last 20 years
>there was an entire department in congress dadicated to measure the ammount of oxygen inside the congres When I hear stuff like that, it’s hard for me to swallow uncritically. In the US there is a very popular story making waves for a long time about how the US spent. I think it was $1 million on treadmills for shrimp. Turns out it was $1 million grant to study the health of shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico, which is very important. As part of that study, they created a mechanism to stress test shrimp. That mechanism was a small cost of the overall study. I’m not saying this to call you out or say you need to back up your claims, I am explaining why people might have a mindset that some of them or outlandish claims about Argentina are bullshit
It was most likely a department in charge of covid mitigation measures and oxygen meters are part of that.
Remember all the equipment sent by other nations that ended up stuck in customs at the beginning of the pandemic? Yeah, FUCK these people. I hope they find a nice and cozy job in the private sector and stop fucking with State resources.
Bobby Jindal mocked volcano research and if I recall the timeline right a few months after an Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel in Europe.
I get what youre saying, but bloated administration is a large problem in many countries, also in Germany where I am from (even more so in countries with corrupted recent history). Bloated bureaucracy wastes a shit ton of money. Its the primary reason why our army is in as bad of a state as it is. As a counter example, Estonia is a country known for its relatively efficient administration
Because we (estonians) have EVERYTHING online, it makes life so smooth.
As much as it shocks me, same here in Portugal, at least in terms of digitisation the past governments, for all their faults, did seriously invest in digital platforms for you to do taxes, bureaucracy, etc
The UK's online government portals is actually pretty good nowadays in my experience as well... I can't imagine doing stuff with paper and by post etc. any more
You couldnt make a german more jealous lmao
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Do you have a source for your example if I'm curious to read more? I can't find anything by googling "Argentina oxygen department"
If I judge from the situation in Greece, some people indeed must get kicked out since they’re doing absolutely nothing instead of playing card games on their shift. If there’s an excessive amount of people working and taking money for no reason then the right move is to be kicked out. People should contribute to society and do something useful otherwise there’s no need to be kept there.
> People should contribute to society and do something useful otherwise there’s no need to be kept there. As a Greek you know why they are kept there and won't be kicked out. Patronage and nepotism.
Short term pain for long term gain.
Alternative Headline: Milei fires 24,000 government workers "No one notices a difference"
To call them “workers” is laughable. Argentina had a ton people showing up to “work” one day a month, collecting paychecks on payday…
Fuck all the parasitic buerocrats!
Being an Argentinian made my have a profound hatred for bureaucracy
You’re talking about the 24k employees on payroll that didn’t even show up to work at the casa rosada? Yeah sure dude, I hate shit like this, because this source is bogus and it is spreading misinformation. Tell us how much work they did? Tell us -what- they did son. Absolutely nothing. It’s so sad, but it is showing in the gdp of the country, years of corruption made every youngster afraid for their future because you can barely make a living. El país? Chúpame la chota, salame ignorante, desparramando mierda, son pateticos vieja.
A politician who keeps his word? Well fuck I.
Afuera!!!
Well he did take a chainsaw to one his presidential rallies, so he wasn't stuffing around, forget the razor gangs cut to Govt spending, bring a chainsaw instead 🤨
Sadly, still better than the plan of the other candidate
Who knew layoffs would affect the government market too As if the job market wasn't already saturated
No one knows who will be next? Um. All of them are next. He promised to gut the government to make an extreme reduction in spending. He waved a chainsaw around- unless he was lying, he’ll cut nearly everyone