Government sources in Greece have demanded that Fragkiskos Koutentakis, the economic affairs spokesperson for the Hellenic Left Coalition (ΕΛΑΣ), explain the costing of Alexis Tsipras's economic program, after accusing him of contradicting himself over whether its 7.5 billion euro price tag applies to a single year or to four years combined.
According to government sources, Koutentakis stated four times in a television interview that the program would cost 7.5 billion euros annually, yet the same figure was later presented by Tsipras as the total cost across four years. The sources said sarcastically that the next Nobel Prize in economics might have arrived in Greece without anyone realizing it.
Tsipras and the Hellenic Left Coalition
Alexis Tsipras served as prime minister of Greece from 2015 to 2019 as leader of the left-wing Syriza party. Koutentakis speaks on economic affairs for ΕΛΑΣ, a political grouping associated with Tsipras.
In a statement issued the same day, Koutentakis dismissed the accusation as a new episode in what he called the government's serial costings, following what he termed a personal position on a drastic cut to unemployment benefits. He said the government spokesperson had claimed to find a gap between what he told a television interview and what Tsipras later presented.
He said the numbers did not support the government's version. The 7.5 billion euros, he explained, was the full size of the program, which would be phased in gradually up to 2030. He noted that public spending and public revenue are, by definition, flows that occur over a set period and are recorded annually in budgets, which he said was how budgets had been drawn up and monitored for decades.
A new unit of measurement
Koutentakis said the apprentice costers of New Democracy had invented a new unit of measurement: the cumulative total across four years. He said they had worked out that adding together four years of spending produced a larger number than the spending for a single year.
He said Mr. Marinakis was effectively counting the year 2030 four times over to reach a total of 30 billion euros. Koutentakis credited him with some restraint, noting that when Mr. Kontogeorgis had put the cost of the measures at 18 billion euros, Marinakis lowered it to 13 billion, and when Mr. Pierrakakis put it at 40 billion, he brought it down to 30 billion.
Koutentakis: the figure is 7.5 billion
Koutentakis said he was repeating, for those who pretended not to understand, that the total value of the program was 7.5 billion euros, phased in gradually over four years. He said this meant that by 2030 the budget would have expanded by 7.5 billion euros compared with today, and that the figure was neither 13, 18, 30 nor 40 billion euros.
He said he looked forward with interest to the next episode of the dispute, adding that by then the apprentice costers might have managed to at least agree among themselves. He said that if they continued to struggle, the next lesson could be conducted using apples.
