It was in the middle of the decade of the 2000s that a government, in order to appear generous to citizens, allowed the public debt to skyrocket.
Today, after eight years of crisis, part of which is attributable to that earlier “generosity”, another government is attempting to make its own display of largesse.
This time it is not with borrowed money, but with money it has taken from the citizens themselves, through brutal over-taxation.
If the earlier government showed us how a crisis is created, today’s government demonstrates how a crisis is maintained. It is showing us how a political system refuses to learn from its mistakes, and how it becomes entrapped in bad habits, the cost of which citizens are called upon to pay for at the end of the day.
Just as those who were in power in the past, the current government refuses to understand that pledges of handouts do not constitute a social policy, but rather an electoral strategy.
Even worse, handouts are a real mockery when the state itself avoids paying its delinquent debt to citizens and the private sector.
No government should forget that the money it manages is taxpayers’ money.
This government must not forget that the one billion euro piggy bank that it has set up from taxpayers’ money in order to hand out crumbs is not there for its political survival. Its political survival cannot be ensured with such piggy banks.
The aforementioned, earlier government, in the 2009 general elections, saw its expectation of electoral returns from handouts completely denied, when it was trounced at the ballot box.
