Because there is little to celebrate with the Draghi and Macron manifesto for a new EU policy
No admission for the errors of European policies, vague indications on the reform of the Stability Pact, emphasis on current public spending (to be kept under control or to be limited? …). Giuseppe Liturri's comment
Mario Draghi and Emanuel Macron have chosen Christmas Eve to launch their manifesto for the reform of the rules governing the budgetary policy of the member states in the Financial Times (later translated in Corriere della Sera ). We are talking about the complex tangle of rules born in 1997 with the Stability and Growth Pact and reformed in 2012-2013 with the other regulations that go under the name of two-pack and six-pack, in addition to the Treaty on the Fiscal Compact.
We are talking about the complete set of tools that have made the eurozone the area of the planet, among the advanced economies, with the lowest growth.
“Vaste program!”, General Charles De Gaulle would have commented at the end of the reading. Indeed – after paradoxically admitting that the reaction to the economic crisis induced by lockdowns was mainly that decided and implemented by the nation states, whose debt has been copiously purchased by the ECB – they admit that the challenges of the coming years require new objectives and new tools.
They are forced to acknowledge that the ecological transition cannot be tackled in flip flops, armed with a bucket and spade. The investments required are huge and require an unmanageable effort with tools that are 20 years old.
However, when one approaches the "pars construcens", one always falls back into the old and worn-out paradigms of the past, which completely miss the objective:
“ There is no doubt that we need to reduce our debt levels. But we cannot expect to do this through higher taxes or unsustainable cuts in social spending, nor can we stifle growth through impractical budget adjustments. Rather, our strategy is to keep recurring public spending in check through sensible structural reforms . Just as we have not allowed the rules to hinder our response to the pandemic, in the same way they must not prevent us from undertaking all the investments that are necessary ”.
Once again, we have the admission that those rules " stifled growth through impractical budget adjustments ". And, again, this happens without the slightest admission of guilt for past decisions. The word "sorry" is not in their vocabulary.
But not only. They even dare to repeat the usual mantra of public spending cuts. This time limited only to current account expenses (cloaked in a "friendly" translation), because the space for indebtedness must be reserved for investment spending. The model must be that of the EU Next Generation, a slow and complex instrument which, after a year and a half from the decision, is still struggling to disburse the prime installments and will reach a much lower level than the 750 billion envisaged. In short, we are at the revival of the good intentions that have followed one another for years: to exclude investment expenses from the calculation. Nothing new. We used the word "cuts" not by chance. In the Corriere della Sera , the “translation of Palazzo Chigi” (curious how the main Italian newspaper can't find someone to do an independent translation) translates the English verb “curb” as “keep under control”. When, with the unanimous consent of at least a dozen English speakers we have consulted, the translation is "contain", "hold back", "limit", "stem to reduce". In short, something that goes more towards the downward compression than towards maintaining it on a given level. Something different, albeit not sensationally, from the official translation, which however has taken a license precisely on the most delicate passage of the entire article.
Indeed, if, after years, it is believed that the solution lies only behind this artifice of an auditor (current expenditure or investment with repeated fruitfulness over time?), It means that the reform simply does not exist. Is better salary for teachers, university researchers, hospital doctors, current expenditure or investment? Do they really want us to fall for this silly and mystifying accounting classification? Did they think they were hiding it by sweetening the translation?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/macron-draghi-manifesto-ue/ on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 18:10:19 +0000.