QED 101: the parallel divergences
It didn't take long.
By now, between the presentation of the theme here, in the place of the Debate, and confirmations from the best friends of the man who wants to be informed, a few days pass, sometimes a few hours.
It is the result of two converging forces: on the one hand, I cannot keep up with "my" issues, because I am also involved in the other (the thousand issues of the territory, the thousand meetings to keep the various souls of the majority aligned, the thousand checks internal and external on the thousand positions to take every day, the thousand summaries to do for internal or communication use, etc.) and even less I am able to communicate them to you promptly, not only due to the objective time limits (I am one), but also because in order to communicate with you I need to be in a favorable emotional climate, I still have to gather energy, I still have to concentrate to regain my thread of discourse, even if it has been the same discourse for twelve years…
On the other hand, motus in fine velocior : the sequence of events becomes pressing, partly because electoral dynamics are pressing (in a year's time the senseless project will face the existential challenge of demonstrating its meaning), and partly because exogenous forces (the annoyance of the United States with the mercantilist policies of the Eurozone) require rapid reactions.
Eventually, events will overtake us, unfolding before we can announce them, but we will take comfort in that, for they are evidently overtaking us on the road we have indicated here.
Which Road?
This:
(was here ).
We are in fact embarking on the road to a new divergence: to the one induced by the pro-cyclicality of the fiscal rules, on which I confess I don't understand if and how we intend to act (but I will commit myself and I will tell you again), we add the one induced from the forcing of state aid, which helps the North to take off, and from the distortions of the PNRR, which weigh down our economy. Our friend Massimo D'Antoni talks about it today in the Subsidiary :
forgetting just a small "detail", or perhaps simply taking it for granted, as we have learned to take it for granted starting from here : until any reference to that theoretically unfounded and operationally distorted construct which is the "GDP" is abolished from the European rules potential", for our country there will be no hope of redemption within the European Union (I remind you that we have not held an international conference , in front of the usual audience of non-existent).
The reason is very simple.
If a country's "potential" is calculated ex post in an "adaptive" way, i.e. incorporating all past recessionary shocks, any attempt to offset these recessionary shocks with expansionary policies will be prevented by the rules, because it will be seen as an attempt to push the economy beyond its potential, fueling inflationary tensions.
If the "fiscal space" is lacking in the countries of the South, it is for this reason, certainly not for the #public debt (which obviously offers a plausible narrative key, but which in itself does not appear limiting, expected to bring it down quickly. .. we had to make more!).
But there is a political paradox: the political paradox is that recourse to "potential GDP" was wanted by the countries of the South, as a means of adding "flexibility" to the "rules". The poor Piddini, enveloped in their Ptolemaic Eurocentrism, added a grave epicycle to the system: what was supposed to make us spend "a little more" when things went wrong, proved to be the mechanism that condemned to spend much less when things are worse! And this is true in all fields that the country should protect in order to resume growth: public administration, infrastructure, education, health.
Unfortunately here it is not a problem of political color, but of cultural hegemony. That of "Gianninismo" is strong and supported by well-funded communication projects: #eggenerazzionifuture, #aspesapubbliga, #castacriccacoruzzione, etc.
All already seen and reviewed (but have you seen that there are idiots who return to the attack with the story of #igosdidaabolidiga!? But how do you do it?), all refuted, all re-proposed with a tenacity that arouses disgust and admiration in equal parts .
The men and women who "know they know" are everywhere, they are also and, alas, especially among us.
It will be a long, very long war, but to win it we have a solution, painful but effective: we leave it to them…
(… within reason, of course …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/02/qed-101-le-divergenze-parallele.html on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:16:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.