The Accountability Bill the Government Celebrates

A liberal critique of the fiscal course set out in the Budget Accountability Bill, the increase in public spending, and the outlook for economic growth.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY BILL THE GOVERNMENT CELEBRATES
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

There is an old and disastrous habit in Latin American politics: pretending to disguise the blunders of arithmetic with rhetorical epics.
The recent Budget Accountability Bill presented by the government is nothing more than the statistical confirmation of a failure foretold, a genuine economic armistice in which the State raises the white flag before reality, meekly surrendering to the law of gravity of the markets.
The numbers, stubborn and resistant to the official narrative, do not forgive.
Growth of 2.6% was projected, and the economy barely flirted with a meager 1.8%.
What is the political establishment’s response to such a deviation?
Put State spending in order—inefficient, wasteful, unbearable, excessive spending that condemns us to debt for several generations. NO. Lower the projection for the following period to a paltry 1.6% and increase public spending.
Far from acknowledging that the model of incentives based on money thrown around by the political system is exhausted, the choice is to cut expectations for productive growth like someone hiding garbage under the rug.
The spending festival and the establishment’s mirages
The serious issue is not only that real wealth is growing less than forecast, but that State voracity operates in the opposite direction from allowing the productive sector to generate the resources that, paradoxically, public-sector parasites consume. The fiscal deviation is not corrected downward; on the contrary, it widens hand in hand with public spending that insists on living on borrowed money.
Meanwhile, the productive sector—the one that gets up early, risks its own capital, tries to provide jobs while burdened with taxes, and suffers under the heavy tax load—looks upon this course with distrust (barely 30% of business owners see anything positive in the administration), while the political class insists on running someone else’s business as if the resources were inexhaustible—and theirs.
They confuse “social spending” with genuine investment in employment opportunities, ignoring that every extra dollar the State throws down the toilet is, in practice, a future tax or a new issuance of liabilities that mortgages the future of those who come after us.
The warnings of the Fiscal Council and the liberal critique
In this concert of unscrupulous optimism, the Autonomous Fiscal Council issued its categorical report, placing stark warnings on the table about the trajectory of the debt and fiscal fragility.
The technical body warns that, if the country continues along this path of deviations and declining revenues, it is dangerously close to brushing up against the legal limits of sustainable indebtedness, reducing to zero its room for maneuver in the face of any external shock.
Translated into plain language: if they do not allow those who bankroll them to survive, they will run out of lenders willing to bankroll their excesses.
From the other side, the opposition has barely managed to articulate an accurate diagnosis of this waste.
Far from falling into the temptation of demanding more interventionism, liberal sectors of the opposition have pointed out with surgical precision that the structural problem with this Budget Accountability Bill is the elephantine size of the State and its fiscal voracity.
They have focused on the fact that the chronic deficit cannot be solved with patches, subsidies or giveaways, nor by suffocating even further the one who pays for the “party”—the taxpayer who is barely surviving—but by deregulating the economy, lowering taxes, and cutting at the root the unproductive political spending that suffocates individual freedoms and the genuine development of the sector that pays their salaries.
Conclusion
The Budget Accountability Bill thus becomes a certificate of impotence. A genuine surrender over the projected, underfunded budget.
We are governed by devotees of patchwork and “we’ll see how it goes,” incapable of understanding that prosperity does not arise from the offices of useless officials, nor from voluntarist decrees, but from free agreement among free people who want to work hard and prosper.
Until it is understood that shrinking the State to a minimum means enlarging society—something increasingly difficult given the burden that prevents people from working—we will continue celebrating Pyrrhic victories: we got the little votes needed to approve yet another surrender of the productive sector to the exploitative State.
Signing unconditional surrenders before the altar of the growth of economic and social regression.

Fiscal discipline
Size of the State
Growth and debt

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