A demonic bomb has been dropped into the lap of the Brazilian people: It is their public budget. Nothing is a greater threat to social justice than the way in which, 20 years after the establishment of the democracy, we continue putting together the budget of the nation, the states and the municipalities independently of the interests of the people and of democratic transparency.

Our budgets are exclusively committed to the immediate with no eye towards future necessities. The budget is often created in the dead of night without the Brazilian people's perception, understanding or interest.

It prioritizes the present over the future, privileges over new rights, debts over investments, petty interests over national ones, the lobbyists over the people.

When the nuts and bolts of the budget are examined, we perceive that it is an engine of inequality, of social injustice, of impediments to constructing our nation's future.

Above all, it is an instrument of the lack of transparency in decision-making. It spends ten times more on pensions than on education and much more on university than on K-12 education.

Some expenditures are secret. Today the Brazilian people do not know who receives part of the money they pay in taxes. Secret accounts exist: They are secret in the way in which the decision is made as to how much goes to each item; they are secret as to when this decision is made; they are secret in the destination of public resources.

Many criticize the size of the fiscal burden that appears to be strangling people's buying power and the country's ability to invest, but there is no apparent criticism of the way the budget money is utilized.

Brazil must reduce its fiscal burden, but it must also make the budget expenditures transparent. It must give priority to the future and to the poor instead of giving presents to the rich.

The budget should set up obligatory expenditures. We must put an end to that aberration of deceiving Brazilians by saying that money was spent on things that are in their interest but that do not really benefit them.

Presently the priority of expenditures is to favor those who have the means to do the lobbying necessary to obtain budget allocations.

The budget has to make obligatory expenditures. But it also has to benefit the people and the future of the country. The budget has to be an instrument of distribution and not of concentration.

It has to be an instrument of constructing the future and not of shackling the present. It is therefore necessary to change the way in which the budget is set up and the destination of the resources it allocates.

It is also necessary to change the way in which it is presented to the people and make it as comprehensible as any family's household accounts.

In today's world, the space for the ideological debate came out of political economics and the definition of economic frontiers. The economic world is integrated and shackled. Integrated beyond the national borders and shacked by laws that, if broken, gravely threaten the country's social structure and economy.

Because of this, the forum for the great ideological debate of the future is neither political economics nor the rules of international commerce.

The great debate is in ideological politics, in the use of the resources at the disposition of the government - the nation, the states and the municipalities - to serve the population's future and interests.

If we do not make this change rapidly in the direction of a budget that makes obligatory allocations, is just and is turned toward the future, we will be on the road towards the explosion of that demonic bomb into which the Brazilian public budget has been transformed.

Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage - www.cristovam.com.br - and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov-br.

Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome - LinJerome@cs.com.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites