Damage of the madman – “loco” – a Javier Milei. The Argentine president, for the continental left and the caviar press, is at best a folkloristic phenomenon, at worst a dangerous deranged person who threatens to starve his country. But even the right, especially the social right, grumbles underneath us. He welcomes him, praises him, embraces him, but deep down he thinks that the South American liberalist’s recipe is not applicable in the Old Continent.
Meanwhile, however, Milei managed to keep inflation under controlwhich as the readers of this newspaper know is the most recessive of the hidden taxes, since it mainly affects the poor. And to avenge the good results of Mister Afuera, now, there is also the difficult period that his Brazilian nemesis is going through: the president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.
Having just undergone some brain operations, necessary to treat a haemorrhage caused by a fall at home a couple of months ago, the idol of the socialists of the whole world had to get a tax reform approved in Parliament which, by the standards of those believes that wealth is created by distributing benefits and welfare benefits, it can easily be defined as tears and blood. In particular, Brasilia had to commit to reduce public spending gradually between now and 2030, even intervening on the mechanism used to determine the minimum wage (the other fetish of the local left): it will no longer be linked only to GDP and inflation, but also to spending behaviour.
The measures wanted by Lula serve to ease market pressure on the real, the national currency: it is the worst emerging currency of 2024 and, to support it, the central bank has already had to intervene three times, selling a total of almost 9 billion dollars.
Result: Lula also had to use the chainsaw. His tax reform is worth cuts worth 12 billion US dollars over two years. But analysts fear that the ax wielded by the champion of the socialist international may prove insufficient, also because, although Brazil remains competitive in exports, the confidence of international investors has dropped significantly.
Knock knockright-thinking people: are you sure that Milei is so “local”?
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