Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos on Thursday again appeared optimistic that an already legislated measure to again cut social security spending – set for January 2019 – will be avoided, after all.
Tsakalotos spoke in Parliament, in the wake of reports out of Brussels this week that European creditors appear to be “warming” on the leftist-rightist government’s pressing request to avoid the coming austerity measure.
In a bid to deflect opposition criticism of the fact that the Tsipras government has tabled the 2019 draft budget with two “scenarios”, one calculating the pension cuts and the other without, Tsakalotos used an example of a “basis scenario” as opposed to a “basic scenario”, as he said.
“A basic scenario means what you have to work with and what you want to do. A basis scenario is used by every country, in the budget and in the medium-term fiscal program, and calculates what the result will be if we don’t do anything. In other words, what will have if we don’t change any tax (rate), or any social security contribution, and spending, either higher or lower,” he said.
