1 Pensioners are a reliable bloc of loyal voters, but you don’t need to be even an average lawyer or economist to realise that a linear increase in pensions simply doesn’t hold water in a country that has decided to develop as a capitalist society with a market economy. Especially when the ruling party is a conservative party whose ideology, by definition, should treat capital and personal income as sacred. You don’t need to be a constitutional judge to recognise that a linear pension-model is unconstitutional. If that model is sustainable, then the salaries of everyone in the state and public administration should increase linearly as well.
Pensions aren’t a social category. Nor are they a reward. Pensions are personal earnings. And if the state wants to help pensioners with the lowest incomes, it can allocate a dedicated budget line, just as it does for other vulnerable categories, instead of fiddling with other people’s earnings.
I’m sure Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski knows that. But when VMRO-DPMNE is in power, it seems we don’t even need a Constitutional Court. The Prime Minister is everything in one, so if necessary, he can be both a constitutional judge and director of the Pension Fund. Fine, let’s not follow his example, let’s not comment on whether this one-size-fits-all approach to pensions is constitutional or not. Let’s discuss whether it’s logical.
Personally, this entire discussion feels pointless. But the Prime Minister’s logic goes like this: either we do it my way, or I’ll insult anyone who dares oppose me and I will publicly lynch them through snitching, exactly the way his fellow party members are treating the judge who has allegedly already signed the decision to scrap the linear pension increase. As though she owns the cases of the Constitutional Court. The other judges apparently don’t matter. There are eight of them, and they vote in secret.
One of my colleagues at work often says, whenever apathy gets the better of him: Goran, you’re writing in vain, that’s just how things are with VMRO-DPMNE. They promised to restore the country’s name. They promised to change the EU negotiating framework. And with the way you obsess over certain topics, now you’re getting worked up over something as trivial as pensions.
Promises are made for short-term memory, after all.
2 Since the payment of VAT refunds from scanned fiscal receipts is delayed, here’s a little suggestion to help the Government figure out how to save, if the budget for “My VAT” is running low. Why not pay everyone who scanned receipts linearly, say 300 denars each? Why should someone get the maximum 2,000 denars while someone else gets only 100 denars? If a linear increase in pensions is possible, why wouldn’t a linear VAT refund be possible too?
If someone is waiting for 2,100 denars in VAT refunds, that means they’ve spent a lot. And if they’ve spent a lot, it means they’ve got a lot of money. And if they’ve got a lot of money, they don’t need money. So why should the state refund any of their VAT at all?
Besides, “My VAT” was a project introduced by Zaev. Since it was introduced by Zaev, it means it must be bad.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t make sense to you, the Prime Minister will explain it to you in a mathematically precise manner, in response to a staged parliamentary question from one of his own party members. He’ll pull out numbers, percentages, decimals, he’ll extract medians, the square root of GDP, he’ll add, subtract, and before long you’ll get bored, you’ll lose focus, and zone out, you won’t even be listening. He’ll simply outtalk us, he always does.
He’s still wearing us down with his maths wizardry over the salaries of prosecutors and judges. Just a few days ago, he accused them of “complaining about their salaries, even though they’re around three or four thousand euros, and imagine how things are for kindergarten children who don’t have toys to play with.”
Such dire times have arrived after the seven-year rule of SDSM and DUI, kindergarten children now talk only about the judiciary. When they build things out of Lego, they say to one another: I want a house like this, like the prosecutor’s house. And when they dress their dolls, they envy the judges’ outfits. On their abacuses, they slide nothing but the two per cent public trust in the judiciary. They’re so obsessed with the salaries of prosecutors and judges that they can’t find the time to talk about the Prime Minister’s watches, worth thousands of euros. By the end of the day, they can’t wait for their grandparents to pick them up from kindergarten so they can go home and gossip about the wicked auntie who wants to take away their pensions.
3 A landslide broke out on Vodno. And just like that, Vodno became a state-level problem. A crisis body was formed, the Municipality of Centar asked for help from the Crisis Management Centre, the Directorate for Protection and Rescue, the State Inspectorate for Construction and Urbanism, the Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology, the Faculty of Civil Engineering…
Wow… Why are they wasting our money? Why should we be fixing their landslide? Why don’t they call the companies that amend urban plans at the whim of private investors? Let them draw up the repair plans now. They’ve just realised it might be a good idea to call in experts in earthquake engineering and professors from the Faculty of Civil Engineering. Funny how they didn’t need them when they were issuing building permits and when they were consolidating plots of land at “a real bargain” price. Back then, they didn’t need experts because, as they put it, “who knows what you were taught at those communist universities”. Well, now let them pay out of their own pocket. They have the money, people call them investors. Plus, apparently they’re socially responsible companies.
It’s not by chance that Vodno gets its name from the word for water.
And it’s not by chance that planned construction is meant to involve actual planning.
But in our country, the only plan in construction is calculating how much the developers will rake in, and how that profit will be divided with the government. Starting from the lowest municipal clerk all the way up to the mayors. That plan works flawlessly. Planned construction becomes planned pillaging.
But one thing must be clear: Everything is according to the law, boss.
4 Exactly four years ago, on 26 November 2021, immediately after the “Besa Trans” bus crash in Bulgaria, when 45 passengers died, I wrote this:
The “Besa Trans” case will drag on just like the “Durmo Turs” one, over a 100 court hearings with expert reports, counter-expert reports and super-expert reports, while we carry on merely surviving until the next accident. Good thing we at least have Facebook and Twitter. We have to do this, we have to do that, we have to do it this way, we have to do it that way… Who says we have to do any of it? The only thing anyone is truly obliged to do is die. Get angry, comment, sleep it off and – forget all about it.
And just two months ago, on 3 October, right here in this column, I asked what the odds were that two convicts, from the same company, in the same trial, would both manage to avoid going to prison because they both supposedly had testicular hernias. The owner of “Durmo Turs”, Durmish Beluli, and the company’s transport manager, Remzi Miftari, were each sentenced to 10 years in prison for the bus crash that occurred in February 2019 on the Skopje-Tetovo motorway, in which 16 passengers died and over 30 were injured. They should have been in prison for the fifth month by now, but the Tetovo Basic Court’s Department for the Execution of Sanctions informed us that both convicts were experiencing problems with their testicles. Beluli had a hernia in one testicle, while Miftari had hernias in both.
As we all saw, the odds of two convicts, from the same company, in the same trial, avoiding prison because they both suffered from the same testicular problem were, in fact, high. Miftari has fled the country. The hernia in his testicles didn’t slow him down.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
