By: Mitja Iršič
Recently, the media has been filled with news that is extremely grateful for bar debates but does not have any real direct effect on our lives. The President of the National Assembly tries to break all the codes of protocol and good taste and forces her female sexuality into the public light. The Prime Minister “accidentally” found himself in a picture with a potential new companion. We got the quantitatively largest government in the EU, consisting of political renegades from SAB, LMŠ and political commissars of the Levica party. The Prime Minister started debates about the environmental footprint of meat eating, the media gratefully followed him with articles, and even Tarča show on the same topic. The coalition cannot agree on who supports and who does not support the new law on tax administration, which will allow tax collectors to effectively control civilians without a court order. And we listen to all this and in cafes, hairdressing salons, TV studios, and factories we discuss the rags of triviality that the hijacked media throws at us. Meanwhile, we completely forget that we are getting poorer every day.
Oh right – did someone clearly tell you that from January 1st, 2022, you will have a lower salary due to Golob’s income tax anti-reform? It is a direct attack of the government oligarchy on the common man, where the government really took Golob’s wise thoughts, saying, “why give the common folk more money, if then they will only buy nonsense”. An attack where they took your money and diverted it to reward their fighters for justice and the thousand-year socialist Reich: NGO, the so-called civil society, vocal parts of public administration. It is true what they say in that commercial, that the only thing that matters to a Slovenian is “how much something costs and what he will get for it”. Slovenians are very thrifty, calculating, and financially rational. But we still slept through the fact that the extreme left will steal around 7,000 euros a year from us until 2025.
And also, that the same income tax law raised our income tax to 25 percent, which means that the average landlord will pay 67 percent more taxes than last year – or in other words; higher rents will be paid by renters. A real estate tax is being prepared, which threatens to slowly give your apartment in Ljubljana, which you rent out, back to the state or buy it another such apartment during its lifetime. But you are not a “landlord” who “grabbed” more real estate – you just saved and gave up for a better old age.
If you are an independent contractor with nominal expenses, you will pay an effective 8 percent instead of the current 4 percent tax. Likewise, if you are a regular contractor with nominal expenses, you will earn a little more than the average Slovenian salary.
So, this government has made you poorer in 8 months. But you were not even aware of this, because those who shape our reality did not tell you this. We have been too busy with skirts, shoes, the Prime Minister’s coronaidiotism, with bizarre ministers, a vegan diet group, with flights to Vienna…so with things when we finally wave our hands and say: Eh, that is politics. The main thing is that we still live normally. It is typical political cooking of the frog. When Hugo Chavez took the reins of the Venezuelan government in 1999, Venezuelans did not start cooking their pets for a living overnight. The standard of living decreased gradually, barely perceptibly. By the time the people realised what was happening to them and rebelled, they were already living in a military autocracy with the emergency exits closed.
Fortunately, our central-planning Chavez followers live in a system of supranational European capitalism, which, while not perfect, is still normal enough to curb domestic authoritarian and socialist contractions in the future as well. That is why we probably will not suffer the fate of Venezuela, but maybe we will suffer the fate of Argentina. Complete collapse of the financial market, economy, and international competitiveness, as well as the standard of living at the level of Eastern European countries outside the EU.
However, eight months of the government gave us some clear answers: Golob’s political commissars will bet economically on the growth of the bureaucracy, strong state interventionism, draining the domestic economy and private taxpayers, and handing out candy to the left-wing electoral base. The recipe for bankruptcy is ready. At the moment, however, we are (still) dealing with mini wings and a menu because we are still floating on the global wave of printed money and low interest rates. Life is not bad enough for us to notice, but the media does not tell us clearly enough that the government has stolen part of our income.