All things to all people

In keeping with their campaign of shameslessly promising anything that will get them elected, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), who is trying to overcome heavy odds to elect Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczyński president, has now promised farmers cheaper gas. How will they do this?

"The farmer will have to take the receipt for the gas, in order to present it at the tax office and get a return for part of the tax," Wojciech (VOY-chekh) Mojzesowicz (Moy-ze-SO-veetch) (Polish link), PiS member and chief of the Sejm's farming commission said over the weekend in Lublin, the capital a very rural voivodship (~province).

In a letter to Sunday to farmer's unions, Lech Kaczyński confirmed the policy. This is something new - It's a promise PiS hadn't made in its economic plan which the party's nominee for PM, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, presented last Monday. However, it's consistent with their policy, which is to drum up as much populist support as possible by promising as much as possible to uneducated folks in the country. Here's a list of things that PiS has already promised:

* 3 million new apartments for poor people in 8 years.

* Changing the 19%, 30% and 40% tax-bracket system to an 18% and 32% tax-bracket system, with only the richest 1 percent or so paying the 32% tax. Effectively an 18% flat-tax.

* Funding Poland's crumbling health system from the budget, rather than from the Health Fund.

* Lowering the budget deficit from zł.34 ($10.41) million last year and zł.32.5 ($10) billion budgeted by the outgoing government for next year, to zł.30 ($9.25) billion for the next four years.

All at a cost of at least:

* zł.12-14 [$3.7 - 4.3] billion in new spending

And they'll pay for all of that by:

* Unspecified cuts in administration


How can 45% of the population believe these guys?


Latest poll numbers:

TNS-OBOP -
Tusk: 57 %
Lech Kaczynski: 43%

PGB -
Tusk: 44%
Kaczynski 39%

Quote of the week, from PO economic adviser, (and economist for Case Advisors) Rafał Antczak:

"[PiS' proposal] is not an economic plan at all, it is more of a joke. The document contains no viable figures or solutions so I cannot even comment on them. The last time I saw this kind of a paper was in Belarus or Kazakhstan - I didn't expect PiS could produce something like that. ... The whole plan is ridiculous."