Former President Sebastián Piñera responded to the statements of former president Ricardo Lagos, after the latter assured that during his two governments (2010-2014/2018-2022) “he dedicated himself to indebting the country.” According to Piñera, the statements “were not fortunate.”
Within the framework of the second installment of “Conversations of the future in the light of experience”, Piñera supported Third that the words of Lagos “were not fortunate for the following: firstly, because it does not conform to reality and, secondly, because they do not consider the circumstances either”
However, the former president admitted that the debt grew, according to him, due to the scenarios that the country faced as a result of the social outbreak in 2019 and the health crisis caused by Covid-19 as of March 2020.
“In the second government the debt grew. Of course it grew, because we had to face four crises that we had never known in Chile, but it grew less than it had grown in the second government of President Bachelet,” he said.
Piñera’s response is related to what was commented by former president Lagos in the aforementioned forum, where he questioned “What did the increase in tax pressure in Chile do? How much did it start to borrow? Bachelet (1) I left it at how much? The warning passed: I left it at five, she at eight -because the Asian crisis touched her- With Piñera it began to rise, with Bachelet (2) it continued to rise and with Piñera (2) it finished rising, before the Covid”.
In this line, Lagos declared that the public debt was “more than 32%”. In other words, at the end of those 10-year periods, Chile borrowed the equivalent of at least three or four points of GDP, because they did not reach tax revenue, well, then it got into debt. What was the solution? Let’s indebt Chile”.
