Putting in one sack

With the new bill, lands belonging to the Treasury will be leased for 49 years, the revenue problem of the Agricultural Products Department, or TMO, will be solved, but it completely upsets the loaning system.

There are not only negative but positive aspects of the bill. As an example, taxes will be cut from investments.

Especially investors investing in eastern and southeastern Anatolia, increasing employment and creating new jobs will be a benefit from the bill.

But the negative aspect is, as I wrote above, that neither of the laws included in the Sack are related to each other and the renewals and amendments are not easily understood if you are not the law maker or the legal expert. In technical terms, nobody can grab the importance of the bill to the economy and, in macro terms, to Turkey.

The bill will deal with the paperwork of the bureaucracy and will ease the hand of the government versus the bureaucracy. But, the problem is that even I cannot understand what is meant in the text. To put it in a nutshell, a perplexing atmosphere regarding the bill has been created.

Why do we make these laws? What is the duty of the Parliament? Its duty is not only making and passing bills. On the contrary, it has to move ahead of current events in order to try to solve Turkey’s problems, and update present bills in order to support the law and order of the Turkish State.

We are passing through a period in which the impacts of the global economic crisis are being felt more deeply in Turkey.

We were aware that even if there was not such a global crisis Turkey would eventually be dragged into deep economic difficulties as no necessary changes in the infrastructure and no required economic reforms were made, despite all of our warnings. Turkey was very comfortable until the recent past benefiting from credits showered upon it.

Even New York newspaper peddlers were aware that when one day those credits would be cut off, Turkey would enter into a very difficult economic position. Today if we say we have overcome this crisis, or, this crisis hasn’t touched us, it means we are distorting the truth for local economic consumption until the end of the upcoming municipal elections.

It is clear that days before or just after the municipal elections the government will have to take very strict economic measures. For the time being the government is negotiating with the IMF and tries to have the negotiations drag as long as it can. It is also clear that the government is trying to save the day with the present bill it wants be passed from Parliament. Because the bill doesn’t introduce any new reforms or makes clear what should be done to combat the impacts of the global crisis.

It has to be clearly understood that a new economic and political structure is being set up in the world. As an emerging market Turkey has to adapt itself to this new structure and adjust its economy to world markets, which will regain their stability in 2010 and 2011.

The most important aspect of the bill that drew my attention is that a legislation, which changes a total of 29 present bills and will affect at least seven ministries, has been designated only to the Social Security Ministry. 2009 will be a very difficult year for Turkey. Even gaining the municipal elections will not be enough to overcome these difficulties. If you don’t stab a knife in the economic wound, the economy will stab its knife into your body. We have experienced this several times in Turkey.

All of us are very disturbed and concerned about a deep economic crisis, which will hit Turkey very hard. If we don’t want to live an economic nightmare then let’s all together find a way of getting out of this situation without using any issue for our own political consumption.