We live on debt and most of us don’t even know it. Practically, every employed Romanian has a substantial arrears to pay. Here are the calculations made by Antena 3 CNN.
The state owed each Romanian employee 7,200 lei in the first three months of the year. Practically, each of us who work was in debt with 2,400 lei every month. The money was used to pay pensions, salaries, interest and to refinance debts.
In the first three months of the year, the state recorded a deficit of 36 billion lei. That’s 2.06% of gross domestic product (GDP). The deficit for the whole year should be 5% of GDP, but it is hard to believe that the authorities will be able to meet it.
What does this mean for Romanians? It means that, practically, the Romanian state owed every employee in Romania 7,200 lei in the first three months of the year.
That means 2,400 lei per month, a debt that every employee has due to loans made by the Romanian state. 2,400 lei is equivalent to a minimum wage for the economy, which at the moment is 2,080 lei in hand, to which we can add, for example, 380 lei would be the equivalent of a maintenance that a person living in a block of flats pays per month.
Also, 2,400 lei means two minimum pensions with which approximately one million pensioners in Romania have to live.
Romanians were not only burdened by the deficit accumulated by the Romanian state, but we see that month after month we paid important amounts to the state, in the form of VAT. The budget execution shows that the state collected 30 billion lei from VAT in the first three months of the year. So every Romanian paid 1,600 lei in VAT every time he made a purchase, either for a product or a service. So approximately 540 lei per month from the money of each Romanian that went to the state in the form of value added tax.
In Romania, the standard VAT rate is 19%, and for food, medicine, water or going out to restaurants, the VAT rate is 9%. This VAT rate, the authorities said, is lower than in the other member states of the European Union, and there was even a proposal to increase it, but at the moment there is no decision in this regard.
