Who benefits from the oil curse myth of the Russian economy?
There is a stable stereotype, well hammered into the head, it is intended to convince us that the Russian economy is critically dependent on the oil factor, that the primary sector is one of the defining sectors of the country's economy, and its revenues critically affect the level of GDP and are the "main violin "For the whole economy.In fact, this is a clever substitution of concepts! The oil factor of the Russian economy is really significant in the case of only one side of the process - export activity, if we speak at a serious level and judge the entire Russian economy as a whole, then we can notice with surprise that Russia's development is completely different, not the main evil, depending on oil, but a completely different nature of imbalances, which I want to say in this article.
By itself, the Russian economy could be considered “oil” in the year 2000. After Yeltsin’s “liberal” government worked, and at the cost of its heroic efforts, it reduced our country's GDP by 60%, achieved stopping many industries, brought the country into corkscrew.
However, over the past twelve years, the country has already managed to partially recover, showing a three-fold increase in GDP per capita since 2000. But, for example, Norway, which exports 10 times more oil per capita than Russia, showed an increase of only 1,7 times.
By the way, the UAE, which, according to the logic of our “liberals,” should have shown tremendous growth, on the contrary, squandered its per capita GDP by 20% down.
The growth of the Russian economy was achieved not only and not so much at the expense of the “oil factor”, but rather at the expense of restoring production activity, because in recent years we have again increased exports of helicopters, turbines, power plants, weapons, and other things that are part of our international niche division of labor. But it’s not worth talking about Putin’s unthinkable merit, to overwhelm him with praises and faint from gratitude to him, because the process I’m talking about was only the restoration of the former, that is, Soviet development inertia, Putin only slightly relaxed the strangulation, which was squeezed on the neck of our country by the "liberals" of the Yeltsin pore.
The fact is that in Soviet times a reliable foundation was laid for development, the basis for growth and dynamic movement. The “damned communists”, oddly enough, managed to provide a fairly balanced economy, including setting up energy production.
When I hear another talker aimed at “brainwashing” in order to convince us that the “oil economy” is a sign of a backward country, I can only laugh bitterly at how all these “liberal” talkers cheat people, because In fact, an advanced energy production sector is a complex, high-tech complex of the economy, but an even more challenging task is geological exploration and production. And that is why the “oil” countries are basically such states as Norway, Canada, Denmark, and Russia. And, for example, in Mongolia, or Afghanistan, the potential supply of mineral resources is much higher than in Russia, but they are not explored there, there are no such technologies that are developed in Russia. The same can be said about most African countries, the depths of which are sometimes fabulously rich, but if something is mined there, then at best foreign “players” who put all profits in their pockets, barbarously polluting the land and water.
The vast territory of Russia, in comparison with many other countries, is rather poor in mineral resources than rich, simply “damned communists” spent a huge resource, made great efforts to carry out geological prospecting, develop mining, create a transport and production infrastructure (often in areas of perpetual permafrost).
The oil age will not last forever, the time will come and the hydrocarbon fuel will no longer be necessary for the world in such quantities as it is now, and it will happen before oil runs out in the depths, because the extraction and sale of energy resources is a profitable and timely type of economic development.
But the thing is that the obsession with talking about oil, about the raw economy, about the oil needle, in fact - skillfully thrown into a bogey, more precisely - one of the propaganda tricks undertaken in order to inspire us "outsider complex". In fact, the role of oil (as well as gas and other resources) in the general economic system of Russia is far from being so large as to be considered critical, it is great, I repeat, only in the export component, and that is relative.
Here, on the website “Made by Us”, I came across a very interesting graph, which shows the share of oil exporting countries in the world. Russia, as can be seen, occupies a very modest place among them, approximately comparable to that of Canada and Denmark.
And in what schedule (export branches) Russia will occupy high places? But there are such! Yes, there is, for example, among the exporters of high-tech military equipment, Russia has already come in second place, among the exporters of products in the energy sector, Russia has a solid position, recently Russia has been increasing food exports (especially sunflower oil and grain), and the nomenclature of export goods is constantly growing (“Liberals”, who juggle with numbers, usually deliberately take outdated data, slipping us the results of Yeltsin's time).
The most important thing is that Russia has already bypassed, in terms of GDP (that is, in terms of economy), France and Britain, and of course, left behind Italy, Mexico, Brazil and others, as, for example, the rapidly growing Indonesia whose population is more than twice the Russian). That is, the Russian economy is quite voluminous, there are many developed industries in it, there are technological niches that produce products that successfully compete on the world market, and (importantly!) The so-called financial sector, that is, the “virtual” one, is very poorly developed in our country, He does not have such a serious share, which is observed in the economy of Britain. But it is precisely the “virtual” financial sector that will now be the main “risk factor”, it can emerge as a house of cards at the time of the collapse of the debt pyramids, and it turns out that the economies of countries where the “virtual” sector was large will develop into several times (and to the number of such countries, just the same and include the United States and Britain).
Based on this, we can conclude that the real volume and real potential of the Russian economy is much higher than the volume of the economies of those “developed countries” to which we are called to be equal, calling these economies modern.
Russia has production and assets, mostly real, if we export something, it is not “financial services” (which London and New York impose on everyone forcibly), we sell our real energy resources, and also KAMAZ, helicopters , Kalash, turbines for nuclear power plants, titanium parts for aircraft, and so on (the list is long).
In the same Britain, the death of real production began when Thatcher's “genius” activity, when production ran to Asia and other regions of the world, and the “financial sector”, which was actively growing at that time, replaced them, creating national wealth. which now swells like a blister, like a cancerous tumor, threatening to kill the entire system.
But then what is the matter - you ask? Why, at the very beginning, I said that in Russia there is still a malignant defect in economic development, is there a monstrous imbalance that impedes the normal functioning of the economy and social system?
And all this, indeed, exists, I stated positive facts, at the beginning of the note, only to show that the “liberal mantras”, all these propaganda snookers and mulks with which we fed and fed, have nothing in common with reality After all, the problem of the Russian economy is not in the “oil character” of its export model, but in the idiotic model of its tax, and as a result, social policy, as well as in several closely related subsystems.
Some time ago I already touched upon the issue of “tax madness” that has developed in Russia in the last twenty years, but now I will say a bit more about it and more specifically.
So.
It is believed that Russia has the lowest taxes, but this is not entirely true, because these taxes are unusually low only for the rich, but for the poor they are even higher than in the notorious “developed countries”, and although our taxes are nominally (for the poor), mostly lower than in the west, but in the same Europe, the poor are “returned”, in the form of various assistance programs, the lion’s share of the funds that these people pay as taxes, we have a “successful class” that is in power and dictates their conditions, strives to tear and the last skin with great nstva converted to low-income class.
The most curious, and even witty, in its devilish perversity, is how exactly our state uses oil rents, to cover what arrears this money goes !?
It is customary to assert that “at the expense of oil” the state finances the social sphere, “contains the population”, and so on in this spirit, in fact, everything is not quite so, and even not at all!
We take a calculator and consider:
Revenues to the budget of the past year from the oil and gas sector amounted to slightly less than half of its volume, or 6,3 trillion rubles, and the personal income tax (PIT) for 2012 a year amounted to a total of 2,26 trillion rubles, and this is the lowest tax rate in the world in 13%. That is, in fact, the state pays a low tax on income from energy resources, because in those cases in which some wealthy Frenchman pays his state 47% tax, the Russian “successful lord” will give only 6%. Feel the difference!
Taxes are higher than 30-40% (meaning tax on personal income tax and similar), not in all countries, but only in the most developed (Sweden, France, Switzerland, etc.), but taxes are at the level of 28-30% there are in almost every country to which our “liberals” are supposedly urging us to be equal.
And if our state raises the tax from 13% to 28-29% generally accepted in the “developed countries”, these revenues will be able to equal the oil and gas revenues and compensate them.
And if any western country, like the USA, would reduce the tax on personal income tax from 35% to 13%, then the States would also need oil and gas revenues of at least 30-40% of the budget.
So, with a detailed and accurate analysis of our economic situation, the tale of "oil dependence" loses its courage and turns into a completely different historywhose plot tells of the fact that there is a country of Russia, which, even under a bushel, even under the pressure of the “throaty-class”, again returned to the level of 1990 of the year, that is, again entered the seven largest industrial countries (in terms of GDP), again sticking, plowing again, but on our country's neck there is a parasitic class, a throaty class that has taken all the financial flows into its hands, has grabbed the means of production and assets, declared itself the master, and wants to be a hegemon, a tyrant over "bydlom" , wants to push them, tear off three skins, prov Odya such a tax policy in which the "rich and successful" pay, in fact, a ridiculous tax from their "honestly earned millions", and from ordinary citizens tend to overcome all that is possible, and not only in the form of taxes, no, here and the system extortion by inflating utility tariffs, and inflated fares, and so on and so forth.
And it is the class of crooked people who parasitizes on oil super-profits, it is he who uses this unique situation for the country, and the social sphere is much less indebted to oil money, because the growth in Russian industry, compared to the same Europe, is now pretty decent ( there would be enough taxes from industry, since the taxes would not be exported by the "successful class", with the help of ingenious schemes, offshore and in London).
* * *
If we talk about what should be the taxation system and the general economic system as a whole, then if we want good to our country and really want to see it safe, the bulk of current expenditure items should be taxes from "big business", from those super-profits that now they are going to build yachts for “oligarchs”, to buy absurdly expensive real estate in London, to “golden parachutes”, and so on; So, with fair collection of taxes and duties, these funds would be more than enough for the current provision of social obligations, border security and so on, but the so-called “oil money” would have to be completely, completely started up in development, in the creation of new spheres and industries. Thus, the current life of the country and its social equilibrium would not depend on fluctuations in commodity prices.
Today, we are in a ridiculous position, because our country is, in fact, rich, and there are real productions in it (here and from Finland, they recently transferred several productions to Russia at once, closing the factories in their own country) , and the general level of non-oil revenues could be much higher, since such an idiotic policy would not occur when even part of the formal state money was pumped through Cyprus offshore zones! What is this if not idiotic sabotage !? This is close to natural madness, not just crazy theft.
But the matter is not in Russia itself, not in the nuances of Russian reality as such, because the idiotic model I am talking about was planted to us from the outside, was imposed on us in the Yeltsin period, and is a "pirated copy" of everything that is present and in the United States themselves, except that we have all this carried out more rudely and cynically.
If we need to modernize something, first of all we need the mechanisms of social justice and the redistribution of income from production, as well as the system of compulsory investment of funds in development.
And everything that Dmitry Medvedev is talking about is yesterday, this is a return to the nineties, and a losing, erroneous yesterday, because we do not need to liberalize the economy, not to increase the private sphere, through privatization, but rather to increase state control over the economy, to bring the entire system into a state of development, leading it away from the state of the “cash cow”, which is used by the humping-up machine, seized in Russia and exported abroad.
The endless cries about the "raw materials economy" of Russia, that nothing is produced in Russia, are beneficial to all those pseudoliberals who serve the class of crooked men who steal their money from Russia. It is advantageous for these people to create the appearance that Russia is a lost country, and therefore it is unwise to invest money in it, and it is healthy and natural to export money abroad. Actually, all these “oligarchs”, magnates and thieves are smaller, are pulled abroad not because there are softer laws, conditions for investing are better, or something more curly (no and no, because abroad, everywhere, except offshore companies, taxes are much higher and the system is much stricter), but our “successful people” are fleeing Russia not for some objective reasons, but because they perfectly understand the banal thing: their “capital”, multiplied, at best, by “gray schemes "and the monstrous failure to pay taxes, or even simply by the banal theft and predatory ivatizatsii, will always be illegitimate in the true sense, can never be truly legitimate.
No matter how many times Putin has proclaimed the thesis about “amnesty of capital”, about the inviolability of private property, all these “successful businessmen” of ours still cannot feel calm, because a thief always knows about himself that he is a thief, Do not repeat about him that he is an honest man and a successful businessman.
So they are running for the west, with “their” money, not because in Russia a certain investment climate is bad, or there is an “oil, unpromising economy”, not because Russia breathes worse than in the west, no, no, in the west , according to all the main characteristics, it is already worse now than in present-day Russia (and it will be even harder), just any person from a successful class who “otimized taxes” for years, that is, huge millions of money that stole from us, deprived our children of new children kindergartens, interfering with the renovation of infrastructure and other He wants to “save” the stolen money, feeding the illusion that the West will give this opportunity and will cover the “wealthy families” in its homeland, and will forever give a quiet life.
And in the structure of the Russian economy, in fact, there is no such serious unresolved problem, which is in the psychological aspect of the issue, it is a problem of the distorted distribution of wealth, resources and investments.
The industrial, industrial sphere of Russia can be assessed as you like, not the question, not in the assessments and opinions (after all, the stubborn fact is that in England, for example, the real sector is much less significant than in Russia) who likes Russia, or do not like it, but now our country has already returned to the seven of the largest industrial economies of the world, and therefore everything is not so bad with the fundamental factors, the malignancy has crept into the “top”, the defect is present in the “business elite” goal setting system.
Now they are throwing up a new bugaboo, promoting a hysterical campaign around the fact that Russia's economic growth has slowed down, and now does not exceed three percent (although the same England cannot even dream of such a thing), but the fact is that now our economic growth simply cannot to be too high, because the effect of a low base has already exhausted itself, and therefore the total volume of the economy is large, including in comparison with the “leading” countries of the world, because there are only six countries ahead of us, all the rest are behind us.
And the problem of poverty of a considerable part of the population of Russia lies not in the fact that we work little or produce little, but in the fact that the distribution of benefits is monstrously unfair and investments are not balanced due to the "liberal" of our government.
In Russia, a huge number of cars, refrigerators, air conditioners are being produced, food production and most other types of consumer goods are constantly increasing. Now we can’t say that Russia produces few cars, or that these cars are bad, no, it's different! The question is that someone has three or four cars on the snout, and someone does not have the necessary things, although it works, although it deserves.
And to hell with them with three cars (this is not the most successful example, because there are passionate collectors by nature), the question is much deeper, the matter concerns a much more serious gap in income and property stratification, which simply disfigures, distorts the system as a whole and its particular parts, not allowing it to grow or develop normally, there can never be a normal existence, since the body has on itself tumors and swollen bubbles (it does not even cure them, but only on the contrary encourages the inflating of these "successful bubbles ”).
All this is connected with another important topic - the bias of estimates using the criterion of quantitative growth!
Slightly higher, I proved that, in terms of quantitative indicators of the general economic level, Russia, in actual fact, is quite successful in comparison with the main economies of Europe, and if we say that industry needs quantitative growth, the question arises: do you need cars? How many refrigerators? ”In fact, we already produce enough of them, rather we can say that there could be fewer machines (public transport needs to be developed), and in general the reason for imbalances lies not in the sphere of quantitative indicators, but in the sphere quality.
We incorrectly distribute, we do not have the correct stereotype of the social matrix, having seated on our necks a class of croaks, consuming several dozen times more than the rules of expediency and rationality dictate.
But quantitative growth is a category that should gradually fade into the background, as unimportant, because the success of any “adult organism” cannot be determined by the growth of its body. A person, for example, can grow up to a maximum of 25 years, and then his growth is already an anomaly, and since the body continues to rapidly change its characteristics, it means that it hurts obesity, or other unhealthy illness (as, for example, the current US economy, which is is an absurdly expanding bubble).
Parameters such as environmental friendliness of production, coefficient of parameters of social equality, provision of people with affordable education, etc., etc., should now come to the forefront, there are many reasonable criteria, and stupid to be equal to quantitative growth is already unreasonable
No, of course, for countries such as Indonesia, or Malaysia, quantitative growth will still be relevant for several decades, but even there the process will not last forever.
It is not necessary to jump in width, but in height, and if we undertake to dig, then we must dig deep into it, and not imitate the work, making a wide, large foundation pit.
Summarizing, I will say that the main idea of my note consisted of two points.
First: Russia now could easily live without so-called “oil money”, since it would simply introduce fair tax legislation and stop “self-indulgence," when you can even talk like: “Oh, you want to raise taxes then I will take my capital abroad! ”
The second, and most importantly, perhaps is that the current management system and “business” is hardly curable and can improve to the extent that it is a kind of healthy organism suitable for the development of the country and its qualitative growth. The parasitic system of our “successful class” is critical, this “class” cannot, or rather, cannot benefit Russia, because it has robbed it, fears retribution, and therefore hates the country and its people, constantly shouting nastiness and curses.
The Russian “successful class” is for the country what the US is for the world, that is, a parasitic growth that aggressively pulls juices. And the connection of our “successful class” with the Washington system of the world order is critical, because changes in the world and in our country are possible only after a “revolutionary” collapse in the system of world order, after the domination of the absurd American-centric system has ceased.
I will not curse Putin for what he is doing, because he is still trying to somehow soften the system of plundering the country's riches with a "successful class", trying to somehow streamline and rein in this process ... but there is no reason to persuade this disease, we must get rid of it altogether, permanently, creating completely new conditions, or rather a new system, when dramatic social inequality will be eliminated, when the qualitative characteristics of development, not quantitative, come to the fore.
The reality must return to the socialist rails, and I think that it will inevitably be forced to do this, because the current world order is collapsing, or rather, already rushing, using the energy of inflating its bubbles. But when it cracks, it goes peddling, then it will be necessary not to delay, but to build a completely new model.
Although, nothing new, in general, nothing particularly inconceivable - read Marx, read Plekhanov, read Lenin, after all.
And with Russia, everything is fine, everything was fine, and everything will be fine. And it has oil, gas and helicopters with Kamaz, refrigerators, and everything else, the main thing is to remove parasitic organisms from the body of society, and then Russia will again grow actively, and qualitatively, first of all.
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