12th of April. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev the day before reported in the State Duma on the work of the government over the past 6 years and once again stated that there is no free money. The prime minister ignored the proposal to raise the minimum wage to 20,000 rubles.
In his speech, Dmitry Medvedev called poverty one of the main problems of modern Russia. Despite this, the politician noted that there is no free money in the budget to raise the minimum wage (SMIC) to 20 thousand rubles a month. "I consider poverty to be the most screaming and most difficult problem of modern Russia," TASS news agency quoted Dmitry Medvedev as saying.
Dmitry Medvedev said that the government began to address the problem of poverty since the early 2000s, when more than 30 million people were classified as poor. At present, about 20 million people live below the poverty line, and this figure "has grown a bit due to the crisis," the prime minister said. The government must solve this problem, the politician said. The measures that have been taken recently have proved ineffective and insufficient to defeat this problem, the politician admitted.
One such measure, Dmitry Medvedev called raising the minimum wage to the subsistence level, noting that it was possible to do this for the first time in the history of modern Russia. During 3 presidential terms, Vladimir Putin repeatedly announced an increase in the minimum wage to the subsistence level, but for 18 years as president, he could not achieve this. As Dmitry Medvedev noted, currently 36 billion rubles have been allocated from the reserve fund to the regions to raise wages related to the minimum wage. In total, from 2013 to the present, the minimum wage grew slightly less than 2 times. This affected the lives of over 3 million Russians, half of whom work in the public sector.
"The problem of poverty can not be solved only by raising the minimum wage," said Dmitry Medvedev. - I'm not talking about the fact that there is no money in the budget to increase the minimum wage. " Such was the reaction of the politician to the proposal of deputies to increase the minimum wage from 11,163 to 20,000 rubles.
Minimum wages and salaries
In November 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on raising the minimum wage by 2019 to the level of the subsistence level. Since January 1, 2018, the minimum wage was 85% of the subsistence level (9,489 rubles). The increase in the minimum wage meant the growth of wages of 1.5 million workers, of whom 900,000 people work in the budgetary sphere. It is about citizens whose wages at that time were below 9,489 rubles.
As of January 1, 2018, the subsistence minimum was 10,328 rubles. For the able-bodied population, the subsistence minimum was 11,140 rubles, for pensioners - 8,496 rubles, for children - 10,181 rubles.
Pensions and work
Dmitry Medvedev, responding to a question on increase of pensions to working pensioners, decided to recall that until the mid 70-ies in the Soviet Union did not allow simultaneous reception of wages and pensions. The Prime Minister noted that at the present time in Russia there is another system in which working pensioners receive payments regardless of the size of their salaries.
Dmitry Medvedev noted that working pensioners did not receive indexation of their pensions "for economic reasons, because the budget does not have enough money for this." However, this issue has not been finally resolved and it can be returned to it, the Prime Minister added. "At the same time, it should be understood that the financial situation of working and non-working pensioners is slightly different," the politician noted.
