To a safe Armenia with 866 drams

Today during the briefing at the NA, the RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan discussed with the journalists the complaints of the Armenian dentists, who organized a protest action in front of the National Assembly and promised to migrate from the country is the matter wasn’t resolved.

Reminder: According to the reform of the law on license fees the tax obligations of tax firms have increased. “I think that our dentists will not be leaving the country collectively because they are able to receive serious incomes with that business and the tax obligations that we with the National Assembly impose is not so difficult you pay. You can ask any average citizen, who uses the services of dentists whether 80,000 drams is a big burden for the dentists to pay the bills that they charge from citizens,” said the Prime Minister. To the question as to what specialists complain that dentists live better than them Sargsyan said, “The cab drivers. The latter say that their tax obligations are tougher than that of the dentists.” Moreover, the Prime Minister shared his methodology with the journalists. “If you divide the 80,000 into week days and the service provided to each customer, you will see that the imposed tax is not much at all.

Then a question comes if he has to pay only tiny amount every day to the state why would the dentist charge more than 50,000 from the customer?” said the Prime Minister and added that if the dentists increase their charges then the government will form a body, which will inspect and study the increase of charges and see whether those are substantiated or not. This sincere confession shows that how the government speculates what to charge from each person. Nobody says that the dentists live badly. This is not the problem.

The problem is dual standards. If the Prime Minister divides the 80,000 drams into days then he could do the same to calculate how the pensioners live every day with their 26,000 dram pension. He should calculate how the daily 866 drams of the pensioner could cover the expenses of food, clothes, etc. We are only speaking about the minimum needs and not the so-called pleasures that the pensioners would like to live, for example the Internet. By the way, this is no less important because the indexes of the Internet are the favorite ones of our government. Similar to any normal country is should be considered a commodity need (like the electrical power).

This sincere dialogue also shows how our government speaks about small and medium businesses and their development but in practice they do the opposite. This shows how the government communicates with businesses (not the big ones). More accurately, the government doesn’t communicate with small businesses and they are mostly ignored. It shows that for the government the theme of migration is only a joke. And ultimately, on the eve of elections the fact that the government dares to increase taxes shows how confident the government is about its victory.

By Babken Tunyan