Armenia’s negative foreign trade balance is growing, exports are declining, imports are increasing, and Armenia’s economy is consuming more than it produces. In other words, Armenia’s economy is consuming itself.
Under these circumstances, government officials calmly talk about some kind of diversification. With perfectly calm expressions on their faces, they say they regard a rise in the price of gas as a risk scenario and have planned measures to offset it. One might get the impression that they are planning to pay for those measures out of their own pockets. In reality, however, we are talking about measures to be paid for out of taxpayers’ pockets. The money in their own pockets is only increasing. As we know, they are planning to nearly double the salaries of ministers, the prime minister and members of parliament.
Of course, they could say that the compensation is coming out of their own pockets, arguing that instead of using that money to offset a possible increase in the price of gas, they could have simply turned it into higher salaries for themselves—but they are not doing so.
Then they will say that the low price of gas was a noose around the neck of Armenia’s independence and sovereignty, and that, once freed from it, the simply heroic taxpayers will become independent and sovereign heroes.
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Then a whole new generation of experts—or rather, heroic experts—will emerge, explaining with solemn expressions that the price of gas had actually gone up back in the 1990s and that, in general, a high gas price is enshrined in the preamble to the Alma-Ata Declaration, while Russia had set a lower price through a criminal agreement with the former authorities and with malicious intent toward Armenia’s independence.
Some of them will go even further, declaring that it was the KGB that made gas cheap, and that anyone who wants Armenia to receive cheap gas is a KGB agent.
Doubt it? No need. Armenia has long since reached a point where the only thing one should doubt is the presence of common sense and logic.
Hakob BADALYAN
This illustration was created using artificial intelligence technology
