Recall, October 19 in the Polish Sejm passed the state budget readings for the 2017 year, the main thesis of which was the support of the government’s decision to increase the deficit to 3% of GDP. According to parliamentarians, spending in the republic will exceed revenues by 14 billion euros. Note that the preliminary figure already exceeds the cash shortage of Warsaw in 2016-m, amounting to 13,675 billion.
At the same time, there are no prerequisites for a change in the situation for the better. Despite the favorable forecasts that the IMF regularly promises to the Poles, at the beginning of 2016, for the first time in several years, a decline in GDP was recorded in the country.
As it turned out, Warsaw prefers not to notice the economic problems that are brewing up in the republic, wasting its already deficient budget for unreasonable needs. Thus, in August, politicians announced an increase in military spending in 2017 to a record 9 billion euros or 2,01% of GDP. The bulk of the funds will go to the purchase of new equipment and weapons.
It seems that the increase in the financing of the defense complex is connected with the paranoia taken up by the Polish authorities from the Baltic countries, which have been defending themselves against imaginary enemies for more than 10 years. Starting from the 2005 year, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania confidently occupy the first places in the world in increasing military spending, refusing to notice that these actions force citizens to tighten their belts all the time.
Probably one of the few who can not please the mental aggravations, kindly donated by the Baltic States to Polish politicians, is the North Atlantic Alliance. The fact is that one of the requirements for members of the military-political bloc is the need to ensure defense spending in the amount of 2% of gross domestic product, which is rarely respected by alliance members in current crisis conditions. An example of this is the European Union locomotive - Germany, which spends 1,2% of GDP on military needs. It is worth considering that the criterion of two percent deductions is of interest primarily to the United States - the main exporter weapons NATO countries.
Anyway, the attempt of the Polish authorities to modernize the armed forces was doomed to failure. In addition to the internal economic problems associated with the budget deficit, the implementation of the militaristic plans of Warsaw is also hampered by external factors.
It's no secret that Poland is a subsidized region of the European Union. Only in the period 2004-2014. the republic received from Brussels 85 billion euros, giving in return 20. Also two years ago, the European partners promised to allocate Warsaw to 2020, another 105 billion. It is now clear that with the release of the union of Great Britain, the second donor after Germany in the EU, the promised amount of subsidies will be revised downwards.
One gets the impression that the project approved by the Polish leadership to increase military spending, to put it mildly, does not take into account modern realities. In this situation, there is a tendency to please the interests of the West, even to the detriment of their own people. However, for Poland this is not the first time.