MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina: Milei pledges to lower taxes soon

Milei also pointed out that State expenditures were cut down 30% in January and another 36% last month

Argentine President Javier Milei said Tuesday at the Expoagro 2024 rural event in the city of San Nicolás in the province of Buenos Aires that “by improving the fiscal numbers, the door would be opened for us to start lowering taxes.”

“Instead of doing what other governments have done by taking that improvement in tax collection to increase public spending, we are going to use that money to return it to its legitimate creators, which are the entrepreneurs and the good people, and not to leave it in the hands of the junk politicians we have,” he added.

Milei also pointed out that State expenditures were cut down 30% in January and another 36% last month. He also hoped his administration would free up the exchange rate between the Argentine peso and the US dollar halfway through 2024.

The head of state also highlighted the importance of rural production for the country's economy and forecast that inflation for the month of February would stand at around 15%.

Tuesday's speech was Milei's first public appearance after his March 1 appearance before the Legislative Assembly in which he called all Governors to sign the so-called May Pact and clear the way for the Libertarian's roadmap laws to be passed in Congress.

Milei stressed that his Government found “a lot of corruption” which is being addressed. “We dismissed 50,000 civil servants, cut public works, and started the reorganization of the Central Bank,” he also pointed out while highlighting January's surplus.

“After a long time the country risk is falling, the [exchange rate] gap [between the official and the black market quotations] has completely disappeared,” the president also noted.