The expensive bureaucracy of public media

“Until we grow up, shouldn’t we find a new tax?”, asks a brand new presidential adviser publicly. The recipe of the Frente de Todos has always been the same: to use taxes, fees and levies to supposedly transfer resources from the productive sector to the most vulnerable sectors. of the population.These measures applied in the administrations of breeder there Cristina Kirchner and in the current administration they have not achieved more than impoverish in Argentina, slowing down economic development and enlarging the state bureaucracy by providing millionaire resources to different state agencies or enterprises that stand out for their uselessness or inefficiency.

It would be optimal for the new member of the presidential staff to review the reports of the General Court of Auditors of the Nation. You’d be surprised how easily you could crack down on inefficient spending in agencies that live off existing taxes, instead of creating new taxes that would further stifle citizens.

Law 26522, in its article 94, establishes the taxes that must be paid by the audiovisual industry, -private radio and television- to support various organizations. In other words, commercial channels and radios contribute, through a fee they pay to ENACOM, to the resources needed to finance the RTA, INCAA and the Public Defender’s Office, among other organizations that fund independent music and theatre. Of this mass of resources, 20% is donated to the RTA, Public Television and National Radio. It’s final, the television there radio private finance to public media, a formula that is applied in various countries of the world so that plural and objective state media can reach citizens free of charge.

But in Argentina, what really happens is that the public television it is not free at all, even less plural, diverse or objective. Although the private audiovisual sectors continue to finance the RTA, the resources it receives directly from the executive through direct transfers from the Treasury constitute its main source of funding. In other words, Public Television is financed by the monotributistas, the productive sectors that pay the deductions, agriculture, independent professionals, teachers and workers, active and retired, who pay VAT and tax on Income.

It’s interesting to break down the latest AGN report on RTA. For the year 2020, Public Television received 4,352 million pesos as a direct transfer from the National Treasury (4,195 for current expenditure and 157 for capital expenditure). Added to the 1,100 million it received in 2020 through ENACOM, by law 26522. This means that public media costs 5,452 million annual pesos.

You may be interested: Tough responses to Alberto Fernández’s adviser who asked to ‘create a new tax until we grow up’

Let us now analyze the effectiveness of this expenditure. The same AGN report reveals that RTA (which markets some of its productions, advertising or television rights for certain associated co-productions), achieved sales of 353 million for the year 2020. As the cost of these sales, it is- i.e. the resources needed to generate the products and services that were sold, was more than five billion, which means that the cost of producing RTA is 1430%, which is 14 times more expensive than the value of the product that ‘he sells.

The staff factory of public television is 1,065 employees, that of Radio Nacional 1,308, in total RTA has 2,373 employees, which explains, in part, the subsidy that the Treasury must make to the public company to pay salaries, which are also well above those of the average state employee of other agencies.

But the problem is not just the excessive living expenses, salaries and million-dollar compensation that the journalist received, for example. Baron of Orlando or the current owner of the public media system rosario lufrano, as well as the lack of competitiveness and attractiveness of their audiovisual productions. No audiovisual production can be attractive for export if it is based on the absence of plurality, fanaticism or partisan ideologization of its content.

Just look at the spreadsheets. grades, the institute that measures television audiences. Take as an example, on January 12, 2023, the audience measurement of the noon newscast, 12:01 measurement is 0.2 points. If we consider that one audience point represents 100,000 viewers, we can deduce that public television programming costs an average of 272,600 pesos per viewer.

One should not only look at the costly bureaucracy of public media, which also prevents any type of technological reconversion to make its content more competitive or cross-platform. To this analysis must be added other cash transfers, such as the resources distributed by the Cabinet Office for “certain” community media. Also add the resources of FOMECA, Fund for the Promotion of Community Media and Indigenous Peoples, granted by ENACOM and which consume 10% of the total taxes established by law, plus 25% which correspond to INCAA, an organization that stands out for excessive personnel expenditure which takes real resources away from direct subsidies to the cinema.

From the same source, the 900 million available to the Public Defender’s Office, headed by Myriam Lewin, for this year also stand out, to devote itself to the analysis and repression of “hate speech” in the media and networks. social with its observatory.

The conclusion is simple and very obvious, fiction and commercial audiovisual production finance part of the inefficient and bureaucratic state apparatus. Taxes are not the solution, they are the key to our stagnation. To cite just one example, Colombia has become one of the hotspots of Spanish-speaking audiovisual production due to the incentives and benefits that the Colombian government has generated for audiovisual fiction that decides to shoot in its territory. Argentina, despite producing at the highest technical, cultural and commercial level, with multi-award-winning quality cinema and internationally renowned fiction productions, continues to impose curbs, excessive tax and union regulations, preventing the import of inputs for filming, and closure of trade fences on the export of series and audiovisual services. All this is multiplied by the anachronism of the ruling party which prefers to continue to use taxes to allocate resources to gigantic state structures. Since 2003, the priority of the audiovisual policy of the Frente de Todos was placed on the intention of influencing actors and producers, improving the competitiveness of the sector has never been a priority, freeing it from the brakes that were taxed. National fiction and Argentine cinema could generate thousands of new jobs and positively influence the trade balance due to increased demand for their products and exports.

For this reason, we started this reflection with the wrong question, new taxes are always the way to recession, never to the take-off of a productive sector. A profound change is necessary, which allows us to reach the maximum of the Argentine potential, doing the same thing over and over only guarantees failures in all sectors of the economy. Creating taxes without reforming public entities and subsidized enterprises aggravates the crisis and the backwardness, as has been demonstrated.

Continue reading