This is how a crisis develops

Why was the version credible over the weekend that the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador would use funds from the IMSS, the ISSSTE and even the Afores to complete its wasteful public spending?

Because it’s entirely possible that this regime could do something like that. Because it is a fact that the costs of their pharaonic works have skyrocketed from the amounts originally proposed and there is no transparency of how much is spent on their patronage programs.

Because at this point in the administration it is clear that the accounts do not come out between the enormous spending, the reduced tax revenue, its growth expectations and the evident commitment to trigger spending between 2023 and 2024 for electoral purposes.

Because this regime squandered 300,000 million pesos saved over decades for a possible crisis and left those contingency funds practically zero.

And basically because the modifications that deputies from Morena, the Green Party and the PT made to the Federal Budget and Treasury Responsibility Law to capitalize the Budget Revenue Stabilization Fund allow it, even though the Ministry of Finance swears that it will never be your intention.

The Treasury says that there are laws that prevent the use of retirement savings reserves, social security institutions or pension bonds to complement public spending. But the Constitution and the T-MEC also prohibit the discrimination with which they treat private energy companies and they do. The Magna Carta prevents the management of the National Guard by the Army and it happens.

This is how a crisis develops. When the public accounts begin to not add up towards the end of the six-year term, when legal modifications like this have to be removed from the sleeve and when it is clear that if something has been lost throughout these years of the 4T it is the confidence of the markets.

The grandmothers explained it very simply: don’t do good things that seem bad. And if it is really in the interest of this regime to inherit some financial strength to the government that comes after October 2024, the first thing they should do is not give these suspicious legislative blows.

And if they are now so worried about the Budget Income Stabilization Fund (FEIP), they would have taken care of it from the beginning and would not have squandered almost all the 300,000 million pesos they inherited in that essential little store for public finances.

In addition, an emergency fund is not made with the accounts payable of the federal government, but with constant resources. Just as they received it.

It is therefore not a good sign that the López Obrador government is pulling this legal amendment out of its sleeve, without discussion or warning, which opens the door to complete the onerous public spending.

Does anyone expect the ruling senators to do something different from the instruction received by the obedient deputies of the President?

What could prevent them from wanting to spend that little FEIP pocket that they swear is to give solidity to the next government as soon as the following year or 2024?

ecampos@eleconomista.mx