Javier Milei
speaker
426 appearances
7 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 22 Jan
Javier Milei’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 6.
Appearances
There's something that seems trivial, but there's what's called the single paper ballot. Argentina used to vote with huge ballots, which were very, above all, very costly, and that reform, it never passed. Let's say it wasn't done because it always harmed the ruling party. So everyone talked about going to the single paper ballot, but no one did it when they were in power.
They didn't want to implement it because they preferred to commit fraud or use some kind of trickery to avoid applying that rule that makes the election more competitive. Well, what's interesting, we sent that law and it was approved. What's more, now we are finishing with the open, simultaneous and mandatory primaries because it was a mechanism by which politics was also stealing.
We are eliminating the financing of political parties. If you look, we have reduced the fiscal pressure by 15 points to the Argentinians. We are restoring freedoms with a deep set of structural and regulatory reforms. That is, I think that... Any sensible liberal could perceive we are already delivering a wonderful government. In fact, it's the best government in the history of Argentina.
If the best had been that of Menem, we've already outpaced him.
That is, we, in fact, we started to do things right. Therefore, we did not create poverty. The poverty was an inherited poverty. The point is that what we did was to reveal it. I'll try to explain it with an example that I think clarifies what's happening in Argentina. Argentina was an economy that had a total price controls.
It had a fiscal deficit which was financed through money printing just for you to give you an idea. In the last year, Argentina financed 13 points of the gross domestic product with money printing. In other words, a real disaster. So, that situation provoked this artificially demand and puts pressure on prices. The issue is that price controls are applied additionally over the prices that
They enter the price index with which inflation was, I'm not saying they were lying about it, it was distorted. And since Argentina measures poverty and indigence by income line, then what happens? That distorted the true levels of poverty, of course. But that's not the only effect.
I mean, let's say the real poverty levels were higher, quite a bit higher than those shown by the previous government, which showed them at 41% and also did so on a six monthly basis. So if you, let's say, have a growing trend, they are actually leaving you a bomb and you don't see it. Because let's say basically the indicator was measured with a delayed form.
But not only that, imagine that you are also given... You are in the middle of an island, alone, and they give you $1 million. What can you do with that? You cannot do anything because you cannot buy anything. It's the same as if someone tells you that the price of glasses is $10... but when you want to buy it, it's not available.
Actually, there's a joke told by an Argentinian professor named Juan Carlos de Pablo, who says that a man goes to a bazaar and asks for a vase. Then he says to him, well, I want that vase. How much would you charge me? Then he says, $5,000. Oh, okay, $5,000, but why $5,000 if across the street it's $1,000? He says, well, go buy it across the street for $1,000. Ah, there's none for $1,000.
Well, then here when there's more, it'll also cost $1,000. In other words, prices at which they are available. So what happens? When you are faced with that situation, the supermarket shelves were empty. So What was the point of having a price at which you couldn't buy anything? You left those prices, the shelves were empty, so the statistics showed that you were much better.
But the reality is you couldn't buy anything. You couldn't make it happen. So if you left the situation as it was, people were going to starve because they couldn't buy anything. Yes, they had a certain amount of money that could supposedly buy certain goods, but those goods were not available. What is the only thing you can do to save people?
Make the prices transparent and allow products to reappear. Well, when you make the prices transparent, you also make transparent the cost of the basic food basket and the total basic basket, meaning the poverty line, sorry, the indigence line and the poverty line respectively. And when you do that, clearly you will see a jump in poverty. That brought poverty up to 57%.
Now, Argentina found its activity floor in the month of April. From that moment, Argentina began to invent a cyclical recovery. Real wages have been growing every month above inflation. Therefore, nominal wages are beating inflation. In fact, we are already at levels similar to those we had in November. The same goes for pensions. Moreover...
Also, let's say there is a rebound in activity due to the recovery of the stock cycle. Therefore, this is also contributing to more and better paid jobs. In fact, this is so strong and evident that the wages growing the most are in the informal sector. This means that poverty and extreme poverty are decreasing much faster than we imagined.
But not only that, by eliminating inflation, you remove the inflationary tax, but the real burden is the fiscal deficit, which was 15 points of the GDP. Okay, we temporarily raised the country tax. Now we lower it, but we return that to the Argentinians. We gave back 15 points of the GDP. Not only that, but also when you eliminate inflation, you remove the distortion of relative prices.
Therefore, the allocation of resources is much better. Not only that, but also with the strong fiscal adjustment we made, we have reduced the country risk from 3,000 basis points to 770. Today, Fitch raised Argentina's rating to triple C. So? What do I mean?
That translates into a lower country risk and interest rates, and that generates an increase in investment, also generates an increase in consumption. In other words, the Argentinian economy is currently in an absolutely flourishing moment.
And how is that sustained in the long term with structural reforms, which we implement daily deregulating the economy and introducing new laws that free Argentinians from the many oppressive measures that have burdened it, over the past 100 years.
Look, we have fought against corruption like never before in Argentina. In fact, when we took office, for example, there were about 900 roadblocks per year. That is, people who made a habit of blocking the streets. They prevented free movement. And besides, they were given social plans and they were given a lot of money.
Showing 261–280 of 426 · page 14 of 22
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