In the unlikely event of the headline’s origin needing any explanation, it comes from the first line of the chorus to the 1966 song ‘Taxman’ written by this columnist’s favourite Beatle, George Harrison: “’Cause I’m the taxman” – come to think of it, since this song is a protest against purportedly 95 percent taxation (especially with President Javier Milei pledging tax cuts of 90 percent in his Tuesday evening anniversary nationwide broadcast), it might make a much better anthem for the anarcho-capitalist creed than Village People stuff. The headline rewords the original to reflect the fact that ARCA (until recently AFIP) tax bureau chief Florencia Misrahi was abruptly fired last weekend.
Argentine governments of all stripes in living memory have constantly buried unpopular or controversial announcements by leaving them to Friday evenings or early in the weekend in the hope that they will have been forgotten by the time the next week begins and this particular example seems to have been pretty successful in those terms. Nevertheless, Misrahi’s dismissal could be worth a closer look to have some idea of where the libertarian government is heading as its second year begins.
The official explanation for Misrahi’s ouster as provided by Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni was so brutally blunt that it would seem to speak for itself, leaving no room for any subtext, but it may not be so simple. According to Adorni, Misrahi had to go because she was mooting a new regime to tax streamers, influencers, youtubers, bloggers or whatever they might call themselves – evidently this media substratum is so fundamental to La Libertad Avanza’s “cultural wars” that they constitute a new caste of untouchables (however much of an oxymoron this might sound for the Indian system of social categories) so it was entirely understandable that Milei should blow his top against this initiative.
This explanation’s lack of subtlety comes as something of a surprise, leaving the government exposed to charges of creating a new caste of the politically privileged exempt from accountability. They might logically have been expected to seek another pretext for dumping Misrahi. And indeed the social networks endeavoured to supply an alternative rumour by circulating the report that Misrahi had rejected any cut in her monthly salary of 30-plus million pesos – this might be true but it might also be chatroom pushback against a potential tax nemesis.
The government could also have presented the argument that ARCA was such a different beast to AFIP that a new helm was required and indeed there was something of that when the switch between the two acronyms was made seven weeks ago. At that time Misrahi was effectively displaced by the two “Andrés Vs” (with Vázquez taking charge of DGI internal revenue and Velis of the Customs) so that she remained the nominal head while losing control of the administration of both taxation and customs duties – “emasculated” to use an anachronistic and inappropriate term.
The official explanation seems to fit into the “what you see is what you get” image often associated with Milei due to its air of almost self-incriminating honesty yet this columnist retains the nagging suspicion that what really doomed Misrahi were her links with ex-president Mauricio Macri’s PRO centre-right party (even if her successor Juan Pazo shares that background). In other words, her exit is part of a libertarian offensive against their PRO allies – presented in “cultural wars” terminology as weeding out the “cowardly right” but in reality based on a purely electoral calculation of cannibalising the PRO votes in next year’s midterms as the low-hanging fruit in comparison to Kirchnerism or Peronism, whose visibility is essential for a presumably favourable polarisation.
The main argument against such suspicions would be the timing of Misrahi’s ouster – why now when an attack of presidential spleen over a move against the pockets of his digital militants is so very much in character? If her dismissal fits into an anti-PRO drive, would not a more suitable occasion have been with the switch from AFIP to ARCA seven weeks ago (to which the answer might be that Economy Minister Luis Caputo seems to have retained enough of his own PRO past as a Macri minister and Central Bank governor to defend her)? Even if these suspicions are unfounded, the government’s aversion to an alliance with PRO on anything resembling equal terms and the tension between Milei and Macri (despite their ideological similarities and despite sharing surnames of equal length beginning and ending with the same letters) is undeniable.
Barely competing with the technicolour corruption of Senator Edgardo Kueider as the main media interest even on the day of her dismissal, Mirahi had definitely became old news even within her own sphere of taxation by Tuesday evening when Milei’s nationwide broadcast featured the widely misunderstood announcement that his second year would include the elimination of 90 percent of national taxes. Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger was quick to explain that this should be understood as 90 percent of taxes, not taxation with the burden remaining the same (or at least as much as required to maintain the sacrosanct fiscal surplus).
This column has run out of space to give any meaningful historical context to its theme, as it often tries to do, but no matter – if next year will bring about a reform to simplify taxation, as Milei and Sturzenegger would give us to understand, that would be the occasion for a more detailed account of the taxes with a history dating back to 1815 in the case of an independent Argentina (and even earlier in colonial times). As Benjamin Franklin said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes” – the taxwoman might be gone as from last weekend but the taxman is as much around as in 1966 when he was bugging George Harrison.
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