Quicksands in public accounts, the unpublished book by Pedro Sánchez | Opinion of Rubén J. Lapetra

Pedro Sánchez returns to bookstores with Planeta this Monday. He does it with the title ‘Tierra firma’ (Ed. Peninsula), a first-person work about the history that everyone knows but that the president is going to rewrite. On May 28, after the bitter defeat of the PSOE in the regional elections, the president found himself outside the Moncloa in the future general elections initially scheduled just for these dates. He saw that he would suffer the fate of other socialists such as Lambán (Aragón), Puig (Valencia) or Fernández-Vara (Extremadura), devastated by the voters.

Everything was lost. Do? Perhaps it was then that Sánchez remembered Scarlett O’Hara’s Incantation of Resilience and Determination The Wind Gone, Faced with the Desperation of War and Extreme Scarcity, which in its original undubbed version reads like this: “I bear God as witness that They are not going to defeat me. I am going to survive all of this and when it is all over, I will never go hungry again. No, nor will any of my people. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. I call God as my witness, I will never “I’ll be hungry again!”

There is no evidence or witnesses that Sánchez utters the aforementioned spell, but it is also from a movie. In that scene, the president decided to leave Moncloa immediately after the shipwreck of 28-M and summoned generals a few hours later because there was a risky demoscopic carom that could be realized. The erosion of the PP by agreeing with Vox would activate the leftist vote. In combination with the unpredictable effect of calling the polls during the holiday period (July 23) and a certain moderation of the PSOE’s speech, they could work a miracle.

But what for Pedro Sánchez is solid ground personally, for others it is moving sands, even within the PSOE or the government itself. After the electoral defeat on July 23, the numbers were still not working out and there was still one letter left to gather enough support. Throwing the house out the window: write-offs of the Catalan regional debt for ERC, amnesty law for Junts and going back on what was said. All of this without taking into account the sacrifice of the Basque PSOE to support Bildu’s candidate for lehendakari in 2024. They are toads that peripheral socialism has to swallow to keep the president in Moncloa without going hungry, like O’Hara.

Crunch in the pocket and budgets

The Weakness of the Parliamentary Bloc That Supports the New Government Lies Precisely That It Has Built the Foundations of the Humiliation of the Piellación of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of the of all the Soe, THEIR Voters and the Majority of Socialist Ministers of the New Government, Who Have gone from attacking the amnesty to defending it as a lesser evil. The series of electoral appointments in the Basque Country, Galicia and the European Parliament will determine whether the legislature that has just begun can end ahead of schedule. Whether the political tension will increase or decrease will probably depend on these results.

But the true story that is about to be written is that of the irritation that household pockets are suffering after the constant increase in the government’s fiscal pressure to support public accounts that do not quite balance. Income tax collection (IRPF) has just exceeded 100,000 million euros until October, with an increase of 9.6% year-on-year. It is estimated that tax revenues on income from work and income have soared by no less than 40% in four years, crippling pockets as much or more than inflation or interest rates.

The fiscal effort will have been of little use because there is still a public deficit for another year. It is a never-ending story because it will become an increase in public debt that is also increasingly expensive to maintain. The refinancings of 2024 will be more expensive if possible and will skyrocket the interest cost of the debt of public administrations above 40,000 million euros annually. They are around 15,000 million more than just a year and a half ago.

Let’s add to the bill the nearly 25,000 million extra that the Government has added as a structural expense to revalue pensions in two years. If we add both items, the next book of the General State Budgets (PGE) must contain an item close to 240,000 million euros annually only for debt and pensions. That amount must be set aside before starting to govern and allocate public money to health, education, defense, housing…

Until now, the increase in public debt made it possible to achieve anything. During the last four years, the gap has been 340,000 million euros, to which must be added the aid to a lost fund of 37,000 million euros from European Next Generation funds. From now on, this lack of control will not continue because investors are becoming increasingly demanding to lend their money. The new Sánchez Government will have to face new tax increases to balance accounts, but also cuts in surgical and behind-the-scenes expenses in the hope that no one notices or hears it. This will be helped by the political quarrel that is taking root in the new parliament, as plurinational as the one in Strasbourg.