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By Lisandra Paraguassu
BRASÍLIA (Reuters) – Economy Minister Paulo Guedes on Wednesday denied the extension of emergency aid or the state of calamity beyond December this year.
Guedes said, in an interview with some journalists, that there is no decision to extend or articulate accordingly.
“There is an emergency aid plan that lasts until the end of December. There is a state of public calamity that lasts until the end of December. And by the end of December, all that is over, period,” said the minister.
“There is no extension, today the information that exists is the following: there is no extension. The Minister of Economy is discrediting any information about the extension of this or that,” he added.
Shortly after Guedes ‘statement, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia (DEM-RJ), published the link to the Reuters note on Guedes’ speech and stated: “The position of the president of the Chamber is the same “.
The demonstration of the Minister of Economy took place in the middle of the news that, without definition of Citizen Income from 2021 – a new income transfer program that will come instead of Bolsa Família – the government would be focused on the extension of the measures adopted this year in an extraordinary way, due to the impacts on the economy of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Emergency aid was the government’s most important initiative in the crisis. With a value of 600 reais from April to August and 300 reais the rest of the year, it will have a total cost of 321.8 billion reais in 2020, benefiting more than 60 million people per month.
Government officials have stressed that the Citizen Income is necessary to promote a kind of landing for the program, as millions of Brazilians will remain unemployed next year.
But to vitaminize its budget and at the same time maintain respect for the spending ceiling, the government necessarily has to cut spending, and President Jair Bolsonaro has vetoed ideas raised by the economic team so far, such as the channeling to the new program of assignments. wage and pension insurance.
Since next year’s budget bill was sent to Congress with no room to spare in relation to the spending cap, for the cap to remain in place, new spending can only be made if others are cut. Therefore, it is not enough for the government to identify the sources of income;
For next year, the government considered in its budget project an increase of 5,373 million reais for Bolsa Família compared to the 2020 Budget, up to a total of 34,858 million reais. Approximately 15.2 million families must be eligible to receive the benefit, up from 13.2 million in 2020.
Bolsonaro has been insisting, however, on the desire to expand the universe of beneficiaries by some 8 million more, as a result of the damage to the economy caused by the coronavirus crisis and also attentive to the political dividends that the help of emergency.
(With additional reporting by Marcela Ayres)
