Ukrainian households to spend more for utilities than their incomes, thanks to IMF mafia

By Vladimir V. Sytin
The Ukrainian Times

Owing to the IMF shock therapy mafia and neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, Ukrainian households will pay for natural gas 2.4 times more than they earn. “It’s all stuff and nonsense as far as the world economy is concerned,” said Alexander Okhrimenko, head of the Ukrainian Analytical Center, expressing a sense felt across this country. “Although gas prices are high in other countries, the level of wages is much higher there than in Ukraine.”

By comparison, a ratio of gas prices to an after-tax average wage accounts for 30% and 24% in Germany and France respectively.

At present, Ukraine is in a state of economic collapse. Prices of utilities have skyrocketed, whereas starvation wages and pensions remain unchanged.

As Alexander Okhrimenko put it, recommendations of the International Monetary Fund proved erroneous. “Instead of prosperity the Ukrainian economy has gone into a tailspin,” he said. “IMF specialists have a vague idea of the economic model of this country and they are inclined to consider the Ukrainian economy as some page in a textbook on the economy of an American college.”

Many analysts say there is no sense in getting loans from the IMF because they do not help the situation. They think the IMF shock therapy mafia is virtually destroying Ukraine.

What is required is a proper Robin Hood economy: take from the rich and give to the poor. The Ukrainian society should encourage business people to invest efficiently – and create real wealth – not argue how much to tax them. Also, it is necessary to carry out a program for the regeneration of the national economy, relying on the Ukrainian labor and scientific potential. Wealth is in everything from food to factories, fertile land to pharmaceutical laboratories.

Readers of The Ukrainian Times know that cooperation with the IMF (or International Monetary Fiasco, as the joke has it) is the catalyst of crises and defaults. Note that South Korea successfully rode out a crisis without slavishly following the IMF rule book, as it had timely realized a danger to its economic security and discontinued cooperation with the faulty fund. Like a knot that tightens when you wriggle, the IMF loans’ response to a crisis creates the next problem.

Today Ukrainian taxpayer is stuck with massive loans to the IMF, loans that will take generations to pay off. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is morally wrong. Especially when Peter is a hard-working taxpayer.

Overall, Western observers describe the foreign aid as “poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries” (read: Ukrainian oligarchs Poroshenko, Kolomoiskiy, Taruta and Timoshenko). Cronies in the private sector make sure strings get attached to the air package. Money to El Salvador, for example, was withheld until the country agreed to buy genetically-modified seeds from Monsanto.

When idiot authorities in Kiev act as if they are immune from economic reality, the problem now for citizens of Ukraine is to know how all this chaos will affect their standard of life.