If it wasn"t for the IMF coming over to visit on April 27th, to decide whether they"re going to give us in June, the fifth installment of the loan (850 million Euros), then president Traian Băsescu would stop making a fuss on B1 TV that the Government hasn"t laid off enough public sector workers and he wouldn"t have had to ask the Boc cabinet to come over to the Cotroceni palace today to show him where the layoffs are buried in all those statistics. Because he can"t find them.

In the beginning of the year, the Minister of Finance Sebastian Vlădescu had said that a hundred thousand public sector workers would need to be laid off.

Today, almost for months later, the number of employees in the civil sector workers doesn"t seem to have shrunk significantly (except perhaps for the 10,000 railway sector workers from the Romanian Railway Company, which is now hiring again"), nor did spending, in spite of some public institutions being merged.

Lucian Croitoru, advisor to the governor of the NBR, appointed PM during the political crisis which occurred around the elections, at the end of last year, repeated the statement made by Vlădescu on Sunday while he was on TV, and he confirmed that 100,000 employees would have to be let go.

It"s a catastrophe.

Who do we let go?

Mom or dad?

Who do you love more?

Once we get to this painful question (it kind of resembles "Sophie"s choice" with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline), I must say that we are actually taking the wrong approach.

When he was appointed Minister of Finance, Vlădescu had no study on hand that would state how many public sector workers are extraneous. He hadn"t had the time to make the study. At best, he managed to make a simple calculation, - how many public sector workers should be fired to shave a certain amount off public spending.

The IMF is doing it the same