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“The debt we had to assume has to be paid, and we will need more taxes in the future. Our unemployment rate and labor informality have been very high for a long time, which indicates that our rules of the labor game have room for much improvement, “said Alberto Carrasquilla in an interview with El Tiempo.
The head of the Treasury portfolio added that pension coverage is very low in the country “And the fiscal expenditures to protect pensions are very inequitable”, which means that the pension system is weighing too heavily on the country’s finances.
After, according to the minister, the country bottomed out in the second quarter, which will cause the Colombian economy to decrease between 5.5% and 6.6%, which technically implies a recession.
Regarding the indebtedness in which the country incurred in the first semester to alleviate the pandemic, Carrasquilla warned in the interview with the media that it is a debt that “must be paid” and that is why “more taxes are needed in the future” , since “no level of public debt is sustainable without economic growth.”
It should be remembered that Colombia acquired a debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for 5,300 million dollars through the Flexible Credit Line that Colombia has with that organization and due to the good credit rating of the country, with a debt quota of up to 17,200 million dollars, as Blu Radio pointed out at the time.
For his part, last August, Congress President Arturo Char praised Minister Carrasquilla’s handling of the country’s finances during the pandemic for being “quite conscientious and consistent.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Carrasquilla has been announcing that new taxes are needed on Colombians due to the health emergency.
“We are going to come out of this crisis with much higher debt levels,” he said last April, referring to his proposal on the need for a tax reform as soon as the coronavirus crisis ended.
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