Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2012, as news about the 2012 budget of the government that took office in Spain in December 2011, led by Mariano Rajoy.
We all knew the new government would wield the scissors hard: austerity, cuts, adjustments and the like were very common words in the election speeches. Of course, there was something good in those speeches too, because they talked about supporting entrepreneurs, since the self-employed and small businesses would pull the country out of the crisis. Hundreds of speeches stressed the importance of supporting entrepreneurship and of making it as easy as possible for people to leave unemployment and create that much-talked-about wealth (by starting a business).
In fact, the facilities the new government would offer for capitalizing unemployment benefit (the lump-sum payment of unemployment benefit) featured prominently, among other measures to support entrepreneurs. Today we learned from the Executive Committee of the Union of Self-Employed Professionals and Workers (UPTA) that the government has cut some of the aid for self-employment and business creation by as much as 50%, cuts that will affect the capitalization of unemployment benefit itself.
In 2010 and 2011, the budget allocated to job creation was 99.4 million. For 2012 it will be only 51 million. The UPTA estimates that more than 5,000 unemployed people who had planned to leave unemployment by becoming self-employed will not be able to do so, because they will not have access to this “aid”.
The secretary general of UPTA Spain, Sebastián Reyna, said:
I am particularly surprised by this decision by the government, because it goes against all its statements about the need to support entrepreneurship, and there is no objective reason for it. A reduction equivalent to that of other budget items could have been made, items that are being kept or even increased even though they are far less justified and clearly more inefficient.
This news could be summed up as surprise and indignation: after so much talk about the need to support entrepreneurs, blah, blah, blah, this is what we get. Simply put, this is not what we were told, or at least not what many of us understood.
Featured image: Dilema, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
