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He will offer his room Government report, President López Obrador highlighted his saving and effective collection measures that have allowed him to reduce social gaps through his direct monetary support. He holds as he always is, poverty goes up and down depending on the glass with which you look at it and proclaim an effective overcoming of it, even in its terrible mode of extreme
It is not effective as a form of exaltation of the exercise of government.
Absent as the growth of the economy at socially satisfactory rates has been, the government appeals to its spending capacity and its redistribution to sustain its egalitarian claims. Immediately no one can disagree with it, but neither can condone their feasting. By way of transfers there is a limit and it is very likely that public finance has already touched it. Without more recurring resources, such as those derived from a more or less robust tax reform and, above all, without sustained growth, these sources dry up and the only thing left is the much-thumbed austerity, now reconverted into Franciscan poverty.
You can agree with the President that economic growth is not enough, and that justice is essential, but do not ignore the harsh reality of open market economies, in which productive expansion is a decisive variable. Especially if the government undertakes to ensure the meritorious fiscal balances whose compliance is a permanent requirement of the rating agencies. The knot of Mexican public finances is closed and it is a pity, because the immediate future will be conditioned by that, in the midst of the electoral hubbub that seizes anguish and illusions.
However, the President emphasized: “the welfare programs, the recovery of the purchasing power of wages and the increase in remittances (…) have improved the economic situation of the poorest population in the country, and by guaranteeing at least what peace has been maintained and the flame of hope has remained lit” ( the day9/2/22).
Such limited triumphalism does not hide or reduce the centrality of the great issues, such as persistent inequality, poverty and violence that accompany and enhance it, thousands of shortcomings that document the precariousness of the economy and the social fabric and reveal our weak political and social situation. . It is not an exaggeration to insist that the stabilities that could be sustained hang by a few threads.
López Obrador insists that this government and its huge coalition they are not the same
to the previous ones until absolutizing the evils that they inherited from us. It is even said that the only purpose of spending and in general of the exercise of power was the enrichment of the holders illegitimate
of constituted power, but their cases do not seem to find sufficient support. What we have to weave recent history, according to Morena, are words and no facts. Nor can it be said that with his fourth Report the President has brought us closer to a coherent vision of his transformation, much less his structural profiles. The nation seems to sail without the minimum defenses against storms; the most immediate has already been raised by the United States and Canada in an uneven energy dispute within the framework of the T-MEC, but our anxieties do not even begin there. What has remained of the international order inherited from the second post-war period, after so many aggressive crises, has and will take its toll on us, and to confront it, we need a program and a vision, less quarrels and zero petulance.
If it is really sought that the poor come first, and that it be a national and long-term commitment, it is inevitable to insist: the economy needs to grow, because without growth there is no employment and without it the salary is flattened and, to begin with, inflation he eats it, as can be happening today. Without investment there is no growth, but without public investment, private investment is not enough to grow as needed.
The government, accompanied by the new Legislature, should focus on studying and deliberating on the institutional framework necessary to overcome the aversion to risk that seems to prevail in private businesses. In this situation, nothing subversive or for the moods of the Fourth Transformation, it would be necessary to call for the formulation of a national investment and infrastructure program -national, regional and municipal- that includes participatory mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating investments, for the use of the production chains that we have (before a new globalizing fury devastates them).
We could advance in the terms and first protocols for an agreement for tax reform, a pact to renew fiscal federalism. Only then can we sustain anchor
an inclusive welfare system founded on the human right to social protection, first and foremost health, with solid policies and institutions focused on reducing and preventing vulnerability and poverty.
Dogmatism, stubbornness, laziness and intellectual poverty seem to be the basic obstacles to heading towards a new development. Now we have disguised them as polarization, but underneath it what traps us is the collapse of a plural system that too soon accommodated itself to the uses of power in order to turn them into abuses.
To a large extent, our challenges have to do with denials and incapacity, certainly from the government, but also from the political forces and actors to assume a common perspective based on the objective of a national development capable of resisting and profitably inscribing itself in a fickle global economy. that barely peeks out
. We would do well to understand that there are no resources that are worth facing the wear and tear of the institutions and the calls for divisions; in the need to assume the reconstruction of the Republic as a common project.
