Education 2020 founder Mario Waissbluth called the Government’s attitude on the issue of Emergency Family Income “extremely miserable,” the aid bonus still being processed in Congress for the most vulnerable families in the current coronavirus crisis.
Interviewed on Radio Infinita, the academic of the Center for Public Systems of the University of Chile argued that “Emergency Family Income during these days is most desperately necessary for this gap, which is no longer only an education gap but also food, does not cause a drama throughout the country”. In that regard, he questioned the Executive, noting that “on the one hand we are told from the Ministry of Health that the pandemic is going to last until October or November and then comes the minister of finance, to whom I have sympathy, to say in Congress, that the income will be 60 thousand pesos in the first month and then goes down for two or three months.”
According to Waissbluth, “Chile still has room to acquire public debt twice what it has and here we are talking about a ‘minutia’ of the order of $400 million or $500 million and of course it can,” adding that “the argument that there is no room (within fiscal policy for greater profits) is ‘there is no room’ within the government’s mental confines.”
As for debt levels, the academic raised that “Chile still has levels of public debt that are half the OECD countries,” then asks, “why does Chile have to be more papist than the pope in terms of public debt, when it has distressed families in their homes?”
Although “I don’t honestly believe that the educational gap is going to be the main cost we pay in Chile for the pandemic, that is, we’re going to pay thousands of costs that are going to produce thousands of gaps between the poorest and the richest, starting with the fact that they’re going to get sicker and that we’re going to have a growth in the poor communes of Santiago that’s going to be fierce , according to what Minister Mañalich himself said.”
“I’m very scared about what’s going to happen with thousands and thousands of families that are going to get infected over the next few weeks (…). So that element of inequity is going to be a lot worse than what can happen in the education system,” he warns.
Regarding the face-to-face return to classes, the academic argued that “I would be afraid that, until September and maybe October, so we can already give the year, as a year that passed without classes in the classroom, I think that is the scenario with which we have to work”.
