A raise in taxes means bullshit! Are you suffocating the economy, the one paying taxes? Who will the closures of companies’ help – some opened by Romanians returning to the country, who are now cursing their days – if the income decreases? On the contrary, more companies need to be on the market because they mean competition, and that’s where prices decrease. Elementary!!

After a decade of growth, the real estate market is collapsing. The debts of the developers have reached 35 billion lei (double from 10 years ago), and unsold apartment stocks exceeded 10 billion. In Bucharest, over 2,300 developers are at major risk of insolvency. The effect in the waterfall? Devastating!

The Romanian economy will only improve by stimulating the private initiative, not by punishing it. Do you take 10 skins from the horse that pulls? We are liberals; the economy can only get healthy through liberal measures. And the key is this: simple rules, low fees, and a friendly setting with a private environment. Equal investors, equal capital, equal revenue.

The deficit can go down without taxes; it has been proven! Malta, Bulgaria, and Canada (a classic example, manual, but the correct manual, not the ones from which Eugen Varga was reading to Stalin). This government model is not liberal but rather socialist.

But… I see a professional praise choir trying to convince us that “it’s good that it’s bad”. That we should be happy, because “it could be worse”. I don’t list them, out of decency, and not to submit to public disgrace and shame to look at neighbours and their own family.

People are scared, and they don’t even see the light at the end of Ciorbea’s tunnel!

Let’s get back to liberal government! Done with overtaxation and overregulation, the state needs to take some steps back. Just let them breathe, sir! Stop forcing inflation to maintain the monetary illusion!

Stop announcing cuts to force companies to change their behaviour! Did you find out that the recession is coming, and suddenly you announced investments? Well, what are we doing here? Are we building the Danube-Black Sea Canal? Hey-rup?

We cannot continue by antagonising society and finding culprits in one field or another which become the target of the discontent of a desperate population.

Romania needs big projects and investors of high calibre. Not micromanagement, too often absurd. We need to attract large funds to Romania, both in the capital market and specialised in infrastructure, from JP Morgan, Blackrock, Meridian, Moubadala, Vanguard and others. They must be invited to Romania and discussed and negotiated with; they have the necessary capacity and the will, plus the necessary experience to be involved in big projects. Energy, agriculture, mineral resources, plus major infrastructure projects, airports, hospitals, schools, and railways. Romania is not playing the card of energetic independence at all, nor is it using the asset of being a European player in the area of exports of gas, electricity and rare metals.

There is a need to build energy interconnection corridors with the countries of the region, especially the Balkans, but also towards Northern Europe, plus Hungary and Austria. It seems that we are already losing out on the opportunity of rebuilding Ukraine and Syria after the wars. Americans, instead of attracting and courting and seeking, we curse and defy them.

Does it really make sense that Donald Trump and the Republicans are leading the world’s largest economy and the largest global security generator for at least another 3 years? Romania is not allowed to play only the card of European partnerships today. Europe is our home, but we also need spaciousness!

Politics based only on “cut costs”, without investments and “thinking big”, is like the untreated patient after surgery or simply abandoned on the operating table. We are exactly in the situation where we are beating our chest that the surgery was successful. But what if the patient doesn’t survive?

By Rares Bogdan