What (isn’t) right with von der Leyen’s program
Excess debt does not strengthen European sovereignty. Sacconi's comment published in the QN newspaper
A young academic with a liberal education, faced with the abuse of the term "populist", usually maintains that it is not difficult to identify. It coincides with those who think of solving the needs of political consensus and social cohesion with the systematic use of public spending. Do we want to improve school, university or healthcare? “It is enough” to increase the respective endowment funds without asking ourselves beforehand whether it is not appropriate to imagine new organizational modules to remedy the obvious inefficiencies.
Marco Biagi then stated, in labor matters, that no tax incentive (expenditure!) can replace regulatory disincentives. Here, the von der Lyen program on the one hand seems to reduce the traditional European attention to the sustainability of national budgets and, on the other, renews trust in the financial markets by entrusting them with the collection of private savings to support competitiveness and ecological transition. The green deal does not change, apart from a too vague nod to technological neutrality which, if truly practiced, would call into question many decisions of the past five years. The novelty consists rather in the desire to absorb concerns and protests about the European decline that has occurred compared to the great competitors USA and China by resorting to additional funds to "compensate" for the constraints and extra costs of the ecological transition.
In short, public debt is preferred to the possibility of reviewing the disciplines that have penalized many European industries and entrusting the decarbonization objectives to the innovation and wealth that these, if freed, could produce.
It is as if the PNRR has taught so much that it has become a permanent instrument. But excess debt does not strengthen European sovereignty compared to other large areas. Instead, it accentuates its dependence.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/programma-von-der-leyen-debito-europeo/ on Thu, 25 Jul 2024 05:18:49 +0000.