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Our dear Carlos Tello used to insist on the centrality of the Expenditure Budget to know our political economy. There, Carlos insisted, ideologies and ambitions, approaches and doctrines about the State and the economy, together with the perspectives that could modify our background relationships with the world.
Several of ours used to harass him, putting his wise dictum in condition: so he should be with economic policy, but above all with the aforementioned PEF: there they should give the one whovives not only the technical factors and the thousand and one lobbyists and financial counselors, but the political and social forces themselves and their representative organizations, to expose their priorities and seek, successfully or not, agreements and composition They will approach their preferences and ambitions.
But something happened in this long way and that transparency, somewhat idealized by our dear friend, gave way to an opprobent opacity where no significant dimension of political economy or economic policy is confronted, so as not to refer to government ideas or projects in terms of their relationship with the world and especially with the United States of America. Neither winks nor gestures in the style of Don Antonio Ortiz Mena, nor solid postulates to start a substance change from the budget and its programming, as Carlos did before being mistreated by President López Portillo and his cabinet companions.
Apparent coldness, nourished arrogance in an alleged or real financial wisdom or fiscal resignation and fear of debt: from there they cannot emanate any proposal. Pure austerity badly made and worse made, without impairment of sometimes heroic estimates of technicians, calculists and economists housed in the still living centers of economic analysis or foreign trade or on our beaten reserves and guardians in public finances. Anyway … I don’t distract me and go to the point.
Presented a new economic package begins, or should begin, the most difficult and cumbersome, the will and the ability of legislators to “combine” the resources with the needs, given that the slopes multiply and the assets do not remain. If this is the mood that prevails, it is essential to be able to start from a genuine, serious debate, about the design of economic policy for today and tomorrow. No arrogance. Without demagogy. Without impositions.
It also implies having in the radar that to the hardness of the international environment, and of our poor economic growth, there is a wave of deficiencies to which our fiscal poverty is unable to respond. Continue postponing fiscal deliberation, with all the importance it has, is irresponsible. Skinny favor to make economic policy a rational process, which accommodates the claims and rights of the Mexican social pyramid.
And it is that the issue of the economic package could open the gates to planning, to draw a consistent economic policy in whose center are economic growth and the creation of sufficient jobs; Of course, compliance with constitutional social rights. It is not enough to list good wishes, it is necessary that the objectives are given the resources to meet them.
Why not make the discussion of this expenditure budget a tool to unleash deliberation processes that allow us to recover growth with certain development potentialities. What the State, and in particular the Government and the Congress of the Union, are in front of it is not, it should not be, a simple “relocation” of the proposed expenses, but a redesign of the dimensions, magnitudes and assignments of federal public spending.
Propose (us) to draw a new productive growth course, characterized by renewed redistributive guidelines that support different lines of those followed so far. An effort that could well be a support of a new social contract.
