October 25, 2024
The Iranian government has still failed to remove many of the well-off from the welfare rolls, despite years of claimed efforts to prune the rolls. The welfare system was created in 2010 by then-President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad as the key initiative of his time in office. The stated goal was to make a monthly payment to the poorest 70 percent of the population, with the largest payments to the poorest tenth, declining payments to higher tenths and no payments to the richest three tenths.
But, as the plan was being drafted, the government realized it had no way to tell who was rich and who was poor by public records, so it decided to pay everybody in the country, including the richest 1 percent, the same amount. That started off at 400,000 rials per person per month, a sum that was worth about $40 at that time. The payments did a great deal to relieve poverty as a husband and wife with four children would receive $240 every month.
The disadvantage was that the huge payments pretty soon were breaking the bank. When Hassan Rohani became president in 2013, he decided to start the program all over again, with the public required to file paperwork requesting the monthly payments. That was accompanied by an advertising campaign asking the well-off not to apply for payments. Celebrities like soccer players and film stars recorded videos in which they spoke of how they were not applying.
The effort was to make it prestigious not to get a monthly check. The campaign flopped. When the applications were counted, less than 2 percent of the population had failed to file the paperwork for payments. The government then ignored inflation. It still pays almost every Iranian 400,000 rials per month. But today that sum is worth just 67 cents and doesn’t make much of a dent in poverty. A decade ago, the government launched an effort to identify the rich and remove them from the rolls.
The government, for example, looked at the car registry and removed people who owned Rolls Royces and Mercedes Benzes. But for some reason, the bureaucracy found few rich folks and the welfare rolls did not shrivel much. The government has rarely said anything about the program since then. But the new Pezeshkian Administration made an announcement in September. It said that in 1402, which ended last March 20, it made payments to about 81 million Iranians.
The Statistical Center of Iran said that as of July, the country’s population was 89.8 million. That meant that about 90 percent of Iranians were getting welfare payments last year. The government also said that during 1402 it removed 160,020 people from the welfare rolls, which suggests the effort to prune the rolls has little umph behind it. In fact, the government said that during 1402 it added 2,228,527 people to the rolls, or almost 14 times as many people as it removed.
While the additions are presumably new births, the deletions come nowhere near the number of people who have died, so that the government effort to pinpoint the richest three tenths of the population would appear to have come to a complete stop.