Problems of overcoming social inequality and reducing poverty in modern Russia

The article is devoted to the study of the most urgent and at the same time very acute problems of overcoming social inequality and reducing poverty in modern Russia. It is shown that today, both in the country as a whole and in its regions, there is an excessively high level of population’ social inequality and poverty the overcoming of which is an extremely important and urgent task for the authorities. The historical reason for the problem is revealed in detail in the article; it is emphasized that it is directly related primarily to the issues of state regulation of income distribution and use in the country. It is proved that for all the years of the existence of modern Russia, due to the state’s economic and financial-monetary policybased on the liberal-monetarist concept, the role of state regulation was weakened and there was no proper state control over the system of income distribution and use. This, according to the author, was the main reason for the suboptimal and unfair distribution of income between social groups, respectively, and the emergence of excessively high levels of social inequality and poverty existing to this day. Of significant attention in the article is the consideration of the role of budget and tax systems which are the most important tools in the overall system of state regulation and use of income in the country. The author concludes that in contemporary Russia there is an anti-social and anti-national tax system and tax policy since taxes are mainly regressive (the higher the income of taxpayers, the lower the taxes paid, and Vice versa). Taxation mechanisms aimed at smoothing (optimizing) the excessive income gap between the rich and the poor taking place in many countries are virtually absent in this country. With a single rate (a “flat” tax scale), there is a significant income gap between the rich and the poor. Moreover, such a tax policy solves the opposite problem, there is a process of redistribution of income in the direction from the poor to the rich. The author substantiates the need for a differentiated approach to the taxation of individuals and proposes to introduce a progressive tax scale in Russia; to abandon the discredited liberal-monetarist course of economic and financial management of the country and move to a state-regulated model of market economy development.