Leader of LSDP Vilija Blinkevičiūtė says that as the geopolitical situation remains tense, it is necessary to assess security challenges with particular responsibility and “not to sow unnecessary fears, not to scare people, but to provide rational solutions”.
“It is strange to observe that the chairman of the Conservative Party seems to be trying to distance himself from the defense policy that his party members have been pursuing for three years. “We will be taken seriously in the eyes of NATO’s strategic partners only when we offer real solutions to increase the obviously insufficient defense budget,” she said.
According to Social Democrat Dovilė Šakalienė, a member of the National Security and Defense Committee of the Seimas, the defense budget is currently clearly insufficient, so it is necessary to urgently look for alternative sources of funding.
“We are very worried not only about external threats, which the conservative leader Gabrielius Landsbergis has been talking about very often and very darkly lately, but also the fact that the budget of the Ministry of National Defense is not increasing, but in fact is decreasing. The proposal of the Social Democrats to tax banks’ surplus profits has become a reality – banks pay a solidarity tax, this money supplements the defense budget. Today we offer another idea to the Government: allow defense bonds,” she said.
According to D. Šakalienė, this would be a sustainable source of funds: defense bonds would allow the state to borrow from citizens on the domestic market, so the collected funds would remain within the country.
“It would not become a burden for people with lower incomes, like, for example, the consumption tax currently proposed by some politicians,” the MP asserted.
The idea of borrowing from the Lithuanian population for defense has been previously expressed by Eugenijus Gentvilas, a member of the ruling coalition’s Liberal Movement faction in the Seimas.
When the next year’s defense budget was discussed in October, the chairman of the Seimas NSGK, Laurynas Kasčiūnas, proposed to start discussions on the sustainable financing of national defense, that is, the introduction of a defense tax.
The total planned national defense expenses for next year will reach 2 billion. 60 million euros.
According to the data of the Ministry of National Defense, it is planned that the total defense budget in 2024 will reach 2.71 percent. of the gross domestic product (GDP), of which 2.52 percent GDP is budget funds, the rest is the money of temporary bank solidarity contribution.
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2024-08-10 13:07:55
