(story to be published in tomorrow’s issue, March 16)
The Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday put off the vote for the mediation report on the advanced retirement Law until the adoption of the state budget, following the request of PM Mugur Isarescu for this Law to be abandoned. The draft, initiated by deputies Paula Ivanescu from PD (Democrat Party) and Dumitru Buzatu from PDSR (Party of Social Democracy), stipulates that women aged more than 50 years and men having turned 55 may retire, provided that they have exhausted the unemployment aid. The main argument set forth by the draft initiators is that these persons would have no chances to be employed again. The Prime Minister grounded his request on the fact that the social security budget would not support payment of additional pensions for the 145,000 beneficiaries of this law in 2000. The budget is already deficient, Isarescu called to mind, and the deficit cannot be covered from the state budget, but only from a foreign loan, currently under negotiation. According to Isarescu, this situation occurred because the number of tax payers has constantly dropped since 1990, when there were 2.4 million pensioners and over 8 million employees, while currently there are 4.1 million pensioners and 4.7 million tax payers. “The ratio between tax payers and pensioners got worse every electoral year: in 1990, 1992, 1996 and now, in 2000,” he mentioned. The financial impact of the law would amount to 1,128 billion lei in 2000 and to 4,100 billion lei in 2001, the Premier stated. He warned that adopting this law would made pensions recalculation impossible, would drive the insurance system into a crisis situation and would come in conflict with pensions system reform.