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much know has spoken about the tax debt owed by the media businessman, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, and the “agreement” he finally reached. When referring to the case, Professor Gerardo Esquivel wrote that although “(…) it seems like a reasonable agreement in which all those involved seem to win (…), there is a dimension in which we all lose. We are left with the feeling, he adds, that there was a differential treatment (…) fiscal inequity, like many others, must continue to be pointed out and fought (Gerardo Esquivel, “Salinas Pliego and the SAT: does everyone win?”, Millennium02/02/26).
I share with Esquivel the need to combat differential practices and treatment, without detracting from recognizing the successes of the SAT.
None of this prevents us from underlining that these good collection practices do not resolve the fiscal precariousness of the Mexican State nor do they remedy the enormous requirements for additional resources for health and education, areas of public life that at the end of fiscal years and celebrations are particularly sensitive to the ups and downs of tax policy.
Our lack of public resources is not new; In fact, throughout our republican history the low and inefficient collection has been insistently pointed out.
In the opinion of many experts on the Mexican fiscal issue, among the causes of this historical rift are the disinterest or inability of governments and political actors to discuss this issue and point to the centuries-old principles of what we could call a modern public finance, at the level of the complexities of a diversified and open economy such as the Mexican one.
Soon after walking down this unpleasant route of State finances, we will have to come across the sad reality of a kind of resignation, also historical, in the face of the foolishness of the powerful groups that maintain as their motto the refusal of any reform aimed at increasing the State’s resources and introducing forms of taxation closer to equity and social justice. Constitutional commitments to which little honor was done on this anniversary of the Magna Carta of 1917.
“Doing more with less” was a regrettable idea to address this fundamental lack of the Mexican State.
Now the disastrous advice of doing what you can has been imposed, without taking note of the havoc that this shortage, freely adopted by the ruling groups, causes in the basic fabrics of the social and economic organization of the nation.
From this perspective, apart from welcoming the initiative announced by the federal government on a renewed infrastructure investment program, we must insist that this much-sought well-being will not be achieved even in its minimum if the economy remains without growth.
According to President Claudia Sheinbaum, the plan “(…) will allocate an additional 722 billion pesos to what is already budgeted for energy, trains, roads, ports, health, water, education and airports (which) represent 2 percent of the gross domestic product (…)”
A project that, added the head of the Treasury, Édgar Amador Zamora, “(…) has public investment as its guiding axis due to its ability to trigger growth.” (https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/pren sa/el-plan-de-inversion-en-infraestruc tura-para-el-desarrollo-con-bienestar- contempla-en-2026-2-adicional-del-pib-y-5-6-bdp-al-2030).
To this primary consensus on investment and growth, as the axes of a durable recovery, we must add trust, crucial in the world of capital and private finance. Without this, as Enrique Quintana pointed out this Friday in his The Financierthe entire project of recreating the battered Mexican mixed economy will remain in a desolate wait, populated by bitterness and channelless complaints.
Without having a new comprehensive vision capable of aligning instruments with objectives – growing and distributing – which implies significantly increasing public income, Mexicans will continue to turn the wheel of mediocrity, which in our case has meant little growth, increased precariousness and social deterioration.
We must see the future together, but above all we must share diagnosis and will to give the aforementioned government initiative a state and long-range policy dimension. And for this we do not have all the time in the world with us.
