Rio Negro Governor Reveals Details of Government Reforms

In recent statements after the meeting of some governors with President Javier Milei and his team, Alberto Weretilneck – governor of Río Negro – revealed the floor that the ruling party seeks to establish with respect to the Income Tax and specified how it plans to execute the pension reform. On Friday, a meeting took place at Casa Rosada with representatives of the 23 provinces and the City of Buenos Aires, headed by Chief of Staff Nicolás Posse, and Interior Minister Guillermo Francos.In an interview with Radio Mitre, the governor of Río Negro expressed his first opinion regarding the dialogue at the meeting at the seat of government. “Regarding what we saw yesterday, I’m optimistic. But you have to look at the text and it’s a government with a fairly significant authoritarian bias. Yes, there is the negotiating doll,” he said. Later, Weretilneck assured that there was a plurality of voices in the meeting and referred to the details. “All governors value dialogue as a management tool. It was a sincere meeting and lasted four hours because as each one went along, they explained, raised how the central government is seen from the Interior and how each of the measures impacts, as well as what we aspire to from the link between the provinces and the Nation,” he said. In addition to the relationship between the ruling party and the provinces, an issue to be discussed was the restoration of the Income Tax, which not everyone looks favorably on. “We are strongly opposed. With the fall in purchasing power, charging one more deduction on someone who receives a salary is exaggerated and cannot be admitted under any point of view,” he said at the time. In this sense, he pointed out how the restoration of the tax in the interior would affect and revealed: “In Patagonia we have a much higher cost of living and, as the cost of living is higher, salaries are higher. No matter how much a floor is set at 1,500,000 pesos, in Patagonia our salary has to do with gas and oil; it affects practically the entire mass of workers.” The Details of the Pension ReformThe governor of Río Negro then emphasized the issues that do not appear in the renewed bill proposed by the government. “There are no withholdings in this law. It was valued yesterday by the governor of Cordoba, Martín Llaryora, because retentions were decisive. And the other issue that is not there is retirement mobility as it was proposed before: that the President was delegated the possibility of setting the salaries of retirees,” he said. Along these lines, Weretilneck explained that the Government plans to update pensions by Consumer Price Index (CPI) starting in April and that, in order to compensate for the last months that maintained the previous formula, they will contemplate an “additional ten points”. However, despite the good reviews of the reform, the governor warned: “I’m not saying this is going to pass.”

Original source in Spanish