Retirees will improve by thousands a year. At the suggestion of Babiš, the opposition also nodded

The Prime Minister wants to start next year’s budget with Finance Minister Alena Schiller (for YES) and deal with experts next week. The portal informed about it Today.

“I will want the pensions as much as possible with a reasonable temporary debt of our budgets in 2020 and 2021, which we can afford, because we have significantly reduced the debt to GDP since 2014,” said Prime Minister Babiš.

According to him, he wants to achieve the maximum possible increase, but it is necessary to take into account the possibilities of the state budget. Before Babiš submitted his proposal, the Social Democrats planned to support an increase in pensions by 300 or 400 crowns a month.

According to iDnes, they would also agree to a one-off contribution of 5,000 crowns. “If the Prime Minister proposes more, we will be happy to support our seniors,” said the chairman of the CSSD and the Minister of the Interior Jan Hamáček.

The Communists also supported a possible increase in pensions by up to 500 crowns. “If the state budget allows it, we will support such an increase,” said Miloslava Vostrá, an economic expert at the KSČM.

At the end of March, according to social administration data, about 2.41 million people received a retirement pension. If the pension was increased by five hundred, seniors would receive up to an additional 1,340 crowns a month. It would cost the state coffers about 14.5 billion crowns.

The Prime Minister admitted that in order for the increase to be possible, it is necessary to make savings within individual ministries. Ministries and authorities would have to save. The prime minister considers pensions, salaries and the abolition of super-gross wages and investments to be the main points of the state budget for next year.

“We support the increase of disability and old-age pensions. The money for this is in the budget even without indebtedness. It would be enough to cut expensive foreign military acquisitions, abolish inclusion and adopt the SPD bill to end the misuse of non-adaptable benefits,” SPD leader Tomio Okamura told iDnes.

The proposal is also supported in TOP 09. Party chairwoman Markéta Pekarová Adamová, however, conditioned her consent on Babiš to clearly inform where she will take billions for pensions. “We have record debt and the worst economic downturn in the history of the Czech Republic,” said the chairwoman of TOP 09.

“Further indebtedness is to the detriment of the grandchildren of current seniors, and they certainly would not want their grandchildren to have even more debts on their shoulders and thus an even more difficult future,” said Pekarová Adamová.

STAN MP Petr Gazdík agrees with the support of seniors, but described the prime minister’s proposal as pre-election gifts. Andrej Babiš promised pensioners up to 6,000 crowns a year after the CSSD proposed an improvement of 5,000. “The STAN movement is definitely in favor of valorising pensions so as to copy inflation,” Gazdík claims.

The CSSD proposed an increase in pensions by 300 or 400 crowns a month, or a one-time contribution of 5,000. The Prime Minister subsequently proposed up to 500 crowns. Some time ago, he proposed an increase of up to an average of a thousand crowns a month.

According to the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Jana Maláčová (ČSSD), an increase in the pension by as much as 900 crowns would still be small. She argued the amount of aid being distributed to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus crisis.

“We have all suffered from coronavirus, food has become incredibly expensive and seniors are and will be the most vulnerable. We simply have to add much more to their pensions,” Maláčová said on Facebook.

At the end of the first quarter, the average old-age pension in the Czech Republic was CZK 14,397. Since January, just like last year, pensions have risen by an average of 900 crowns. This year, the state’s pensions will cost more than 507 billion crowns.

Next year, the average amount of pension should exceed 15 thousand crowns. The government helped with a one-off change in the law. According to the legal valorisation, the average increase in the pension would be only 749 crowns, but the state would pay 151 crowns to each pensioner.

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