2025 Budget: A budget of high borrowing, high taxes, high price hikes, and poverty

As is known, the preparation process for the central government budget begins with the Medium-Term Program (OVP). The Medium-Term Program is prepared by taking into account Development Plans, Strategic Plans, and general economic conditions. The OVP serves as a roadmap to increase predictability for both the public and private sectors.

In both the OVP and the 2025 budget, classic, hollow rhetoric such as economic stability, reducing inflation to single digits, price stability, financial stability, R&D, reducing the informal economy, and sustainable growth have been repeated. However, essential principles and regulations such as development, employment, equitable distribution, correcting income inequality, and tax justice are absent.

In fact, when both the OVP and the 2025 budget proposal are examined, it becomes clear that it is a budget of high borrowing and high taxes.

Ultimately, the owner of this OVP and the 2025 budget is the President. I would like to state immediately that this OVP and budget are not realistic; they haven't even been able to dream. To briefly summarize this OVP and the 2025 budget;

- 37% of this budget consists of borrowing.

- The borrowing amount is not 1 trillion 930 billion, but 5 trillion 200 billion.

- The total amount of tax that was waived, despite needing to be collected, levied, and received, is 2 trillion 777 billion TL.

- In 2024, 2 trillion 2 billion TL in taxes that should have been collected and received were also waived. Why did they impose price hikes on all products and collect high taxes under the guise of saving 100 billion TL in the budget?

- In the 2024 budget, the political power had set the growth rate at 4.5%, but it was pulled down to 3.5%; in other words, we did not grow, we shrank.

- The growth target in the 2025 budget is 4%; this rate means we will not grow or we will continue to shrink.

- The unemployment rate was targeted at 9.3% in 2024.

Unemployment will increase even further in 2025; it has been set at 9.6%. The unemployment rates for both of these years are not realistic; real unemployment is at least twice these rates.

- In the 2025 Central Government Budget Proposal, although the general public balance of the public sector is expected to have a deficit of 2.7% of GDP, it is already projected to have a deficit of 2.9%.

- The general government budget balance, i.e., the budget deficit, has been set at 3.1% of GDP for 2025, but this is also not accurate. In a situation where the borrowing rate is 37%, it is understood that the set deficit is not realistic.

In the 2025 budget, although the increase in income is projected at 41.2%, the increase for wage earners is set at 29.8%. This means that wage earners will become even poorer and more impoverished.

- While the share of personnel expenses in GDP was 6.1% in 2024, it will fall to 5.7% in 2025. This is another indicator that wage earners will become impoverished.

Neither the OVP nor the 2025 Budget has any realistic social or economic projections or data. It is a budget of transfer from the poor, the needy, retirees, and wage earners to capital.

It is a budget that resorts to high taxes, high price hikes, and high borrowing for the political power to survive once again, and it never targets production, industrialization, or investments. As you all know, high borrowing brings high taxes and price hikes. In the most innocent terms, this means the collapse and bankruptcy of the economy.

Prof. Dr. Duran Bülbül