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President Putin calls for investment in people

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti economic commentator Mikhail Khmelev) - President Vladimir Putin's recent state of the nation address to Russia's Federal Assembly differs from the previous ones in its focus on the day-to-day needs of the Russian people.

A year and two years ago, Putin dwelt on the problems and prospects of the nation's economic development: energy-saving and other technologies, investments and the ruble's convertibility. These problems did not concern ordinary people. In his last address, the president changed the emphasis. He talked in detail about everyday problems that interest everyone: salaries, apartments, schools and hospitals. Only at the end did Putin eventually switch to energy, investments and innovations - indispensable components of any such address.

Apparently, the president had to tell the MPs that half of all housing stock had not seen repairs in half a century to motivate them to urgently address the situation. The reform of the housing and utilities sector has actually ground to a halt because of red tape and procrastination. The president called immoral the failure of the government and regional authorities to pay proper attention to these questions and devoted one third of his address's economic part to them.

So, soon we will hear about the start of one more national project: resettling people from dilapidated and dangerous housing. Now, at the end of his term, the president has finally decided to undo the last knot of the Russian economy. The housing and utilities sector has remained one of the few socialist islands in a country that embarked on capitalist reforms more than 15 years ago. The state is still unable to make people take care of their homes because it owes enormous sums of money to the housing sector for capital repairs. The owners of a shabby building will never join together to pay millions of rubles to put it in order.

Soon, the government will concentrate on solving the problem and replenishing regional housing and utilities budgets. The president said that the federal budget would spend dozens of times more money than before on repairing shabby houses and on resettling people from slums. Putin said the government needed to allocate at least 100 billion rubles for a program to move people out of dilapidated housing and another 150 billion for repairs of housing stock. A special fund with at least 250 billion rubles will be set up to finance these huge expenditures.

The fund will be made up of revenues from the sale of government property, improved tax collection, and probably, from the sale of Yukos assets. Giving Yukos money to the people is a good way of sweeping under the carpet an operation that was conducted in tandem by the Prosecutor General's Office and the Taxation Service, and that has become the most dubious undertaking of Putin's entire rule.

Incidentally, dilapidated housing is not the only social program on which the government will spend the easy money that the oil-and-gas boom has showered on Russia in the last few years. It appears that all three piggy banks that are now collecting surplus income from oil exports have a social mission. The money will be used to finance huge budgetary spending on social needs, support culture and replenish the meager pension fund.

Seniors are another category of people to whom the president paid special attention. He promised a 65% increase in pensions in the next three years to those who already receive them and called on those who are about to become pensioners to take care of the problem themselves. Putin also reassured future pensioners - those who will be collecting between 2012 and 2030 - that the retirement age would not go up while he was in power.

Regrettably, the rest of his address's economic portion abounded in reproaches to the government, and the words "I believe," "it is necessary", "it is sensible" and the like. It is very good that the president paid attention to the awful condition of Russian roads and airports, the enormous amount of natural gas wasted by flaring and the fact that Russia has stopped building aircraft and ships.

Credit also goes to him for his excellent knowledge of nanotechnologies and the budget clauses on the allocation of funds to support science that he quoted to our lawmakers without the slightest hesitation. But it would be even better if the president had reported on how well the government and MPs had fulfilled his previous wishes. Would he have been able to refute the unofficial figure that only 15% of his instructions have been carried out in the last two or three years?

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.