The Kremlin has big plans for the next five years, and it might need to raise Russia's retirement age to pay for everything
According to a leaked copy of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s next five-year budget plan, the government intends to spend 25 trillion rubles ($403.8 billion) on 13 “national projects.” The big-ticket items repeat many of the priorities of Medvedev’s own presidency and build on development goals laid out in President Putin’s latest executive orders.
The biggest projects on the list are new roads (8.4 trillion rubles), demography (3.6 trillion rubles), and infrastructure (1.8 trillion rubles). The government also plans to devote significant resources to the fight against cancer and “the digital economy,” providing more broadband Internet connections to public sector facilities.
Planned federal budgets already allocate 17 trillion rubles ($274.6 billion) to the new “national projects,” and the remaining 8 trillion rubles ($129.2 billion) could come from the savings the government would incur, if it raised Russia’s retirement age, according to the newspaper Kommersant. Dmitry Medvedev recently said his cabinet will advocate raising the age at which Russians can start collecting social security.
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