Rouhani: Protest is a right for the people, but it is quite different from spreading anarchy

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani referred to events in the country over the past three days, saying: “The government’s goal in the livelihood support project is to deliver assistance to middle-income families with low income to society.”

“We have only three ways: to raise popular taxes or to export more oil or to reduce the number of government subsidies and return their revenues to the miserable,” Rouhani said Sunday at the cabinet meeting.

“The purchase of oil has some problems and even if we did not have some problems, the oil revenues were not suitable for such costs. In 1390 we had 110 billion dollars of oil revenues, but today the conditions are completely different,” he said.

“Because of the economic conditions of society, we cannot raise the tax figure and the taxes must be neutral,” he said.

President Rouhani stressed that for many months the issue was how to support the middle and weak segments of the Iranian society.“During this government, we tried to increase oil production and in 1392 the country’s oil figure was 56 million liters per day and we brought this figure to 107 million liters in the current year and we got the self – sufficiency in oil production. Previously there were billions of dollars of budget allocated for importing oil into the country, but there were some problems to buy and import oil.

He pointed to the increasing consumption of oil in the country, saying: “Increasing the number of oil consumption since the end of last year and the beginning of the current year and there is a growth in consumption by the figure of 9/7 percent, and if this situation continues we will have to import oil again in 1400.”