The Buenos Aires governor proposes a measure that caused the destruction of Argentina's energy sector.
At the same time, subsidized pricing fueled inefficient consumption. Without incentives for energy savings, demand grew above production capacity, creating a structural imbalance between supply and consumption
The governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, told the Government of Javier Milei to control prices to stop the increase in
fuels, a measure carried out by Kirchnerism in the past, and which generated devastating consequences.During a press conference at the Buenos Aires Government House, the ultra-Kirchner leader demanded: “I call on the Government to take care of people's pockets; that's why we have a national YPF, to have a policy around the price of domestic fuels, especially when we have already achieved self-sufficiency.”
The governor also defended state control of YPF and questioned the successful model of Javier Milei's government. “The model that Milei wants is to hand over the natural resource and lose the opportunity to generate national industry and productive chains,” he said
with lies.
The control of tariffs and fuels was a determining factor in the deterioration of the energy sector during Kirchnerism, when the country went from exporting energy to relying on imports to meet domestic demand
.One of the main effects of this scheme was the disincentive to invest. With artificially low prices and rising costs, corporate profitability plummeted, holding back investment in exploration. As a result, gas and oil reserves began to fall steadily
This imbalance forced the State to import energy on a large scale to avoid outages, increasing the cost of the system. To avoid transferring those costs to users, massive subsidies were implemented that ended up putting pressure on public accounts
.
Expenditure on energy subsidies increased exponentially, going from practically zero levels to representing between 3% and 4% of GDP by 2014, becoming one of the main drivers of fiscal deficit and monetary issuance, which caused a strong increase in
inflation.The impact was also felt on infrastructure. Distribution companies such as Edenor and Edesur reduced maintenance investments in the face of frozen rates, which led to a deterioration of service and repeated power outages
.In this context, Kicillof proposes to repeat policies that have already shown negative results in the past, destroying the energy surplus achieved by the Milei Government.
