Last Friday, the Prime Minister considered it essential that “the policy” of increasing income should not be jeopardized, arguing that creating more and better jobs “is essential” to guarantee the sustainability of social security.
In a speech at the Social Security Informatics Institute in Oeiras, António Costa stated that last Thursday he “heard someone say that it was necessary, to guarantee the sustainability of social security, that pensioners earn less.”
“What has become clear over the past eight years is that what is essential to ensure the sustainability of social security is that economic policy continues to have a very clear priority: employment, employment, employment and improving overall income” , he insisted.
The head of the executive emphasized that today the government is able to spend “another 12 billion euros on social benefits”, while he “can say with confidence that the sustainability of social security will increase by another 40 years has increased” and “is not at the same level.” risk of bankruptcy”.
“We have significantly strengthened its sustainability, and why? Because as more people work, more people contribute. With better salaries, contributions are higher and the famous increase in tax burden, which they present as a bogeyman, means there are fewer people unemployed and more people deserve better,” he said.
Costa emphasized that social security today is “more solid to guarantee its sustainability for many years to come,” allowing the Portuguese to “close this year 2023 calmly, with certainty and with confidence in the future of social security.”
“What is fundamental is that the policies followed do not change, so that we can get better and better jobs, better contributions to social security and a more robust social security, so that we can respond to both the unforeseen events such as pandemics and inflation. crises, or the normality and tranquility of family life,” he said.
Costa addressed on Thursday the promulgation of the 2024 state budget by the President of the Republic, emphasizing that next year will be the year “where there will be greater growth in support for families”, with the increase in social benefits “all above the inflation rate”, and emphasized that the “poverty threshold has increased by 152 euros over the past eight years”.
“That is why we will have to continue this trajectory, because what we need is an income that continues to rise, that the median rises, that the poverty line also rises,” he stressed, adding that, with regard to increasing salaries , “the 5% benchmark”, set out in the medium-term agreement to improve incomes, guarantees that they will continue to rise.
Before this speech, Costa visited the facilities of the Social Security IT Institute, which, among other things, processes the payment of social benefits and pensions and receives funding from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) of approximately 200 million euros, of which 58.4 have already been implemented.
This investment aims to ensure the digital modernization of social security, with the launch, in the first quarter of 2024, of the automatic processing of family benefits and, throughout the year, of prenatal benefits and a “social rights simulator” .
In his speech, Costa gave the example of this institution in response to those who say that “the PRR spends an important part of its resources on investments in public administration”, and counters that these investments “are really aimed at simplifying lives of citizens and companies. “.
“The elimination of monthly contributions declaration obligations will save companies thousands of hours of work. Is this an investment here? Yes. But the beneficiaries are the companies,” he said.
Source: DN
