Poverty in Argentina fell to 27.5% in the third quarter of 2025. It is not a narrative, it is not a PowerPoint, it is not an electoral promise: it is a figure based on INDEC data and projected by the National Council for the Coordination of Social Policies. The figure implies a year-on-year drop of 10.8 points and a reduction of 27.3 points since the beginning of Javier Milei's administration. In terms of extreme poverty, the contrast is even more brutal: Kirchnerism left 18.1% of people who did not eat every day; Milei brought it down to 5.4%. These are millions of Argentines who came out of hell. Even so, the silence is deafening.
Measuring poverty and extreme poverty is not a technocratic obsession: it is the only honest indicator to evaluate an administration. Everything else is smoke. When those indicators go down—and they are going down sharply—something structural is happening. What is extraordinary is that it occurred in the midst of a political, media, and union bombardment against the economic plan and without controls, regulations, or prohibitions. Only with less state and more market. Exactly the opposite of what the "national and popular" left preached for decades.
For this reason, and here the revelation principle comes into play, no social leader, no union leader, and no opposition force celebrated the drop in poverty. They also did not congratulate Minister Sandra Pettovello for the extraordinary administration at the head of Human Capital. Why? Because poverty was their political capital. Without poor people, there is no intermediation; without misery, there is no narrative. The drop of almost 30 points from the Kirchnerist peak (57% to 27.5%) is a moral defeat for those who turned dependency into a model of power.
However, the reduction in poverty also has to do with the macroeconomy, although for years they told us that worrying about it was a "neoliberal" obsession, cold and detached from social reality. The truth is exactly the opposite: without macroeconomic order there is no wage, there is no employment, and there is no possible inclusion. The data confirm it. Economic activity grew 5.3% year-on-year; cumulative growth over the first seven quarters reaches 4.5%, the highest in two decades. Private consumption is at an eight-year high, an unequivocal sign of a recovery in real income. Employment added 238,000 jobs in just twelve months, breaking the inertia of stagnation left by the previous model.
