The National Audit Office published three audit reports whose findings create an entirely new information environment. They confirm that budgets have been managed in an outrageous and irresponsible manner over the past five years. That, guided by the political parties in power, we have raised our standard of living with borrowed money, and that budgetary problems have been concealed. Most often through delayed submission of information, but not only.
The conclusion most directly relevant to the practical realities of today is that this year’s budget is the result of inertia regarding inherited processes, obligations and entitlements. It would be just as large regardless of who is in power, if the problems stopped being swept under the rug and the full picture were presented to the public.
The philosophical, but entirely correct, conclusion from the National Audit Office’s reports confirms that over the past five years we have lived as though they were the final five years of communism. There has been a total discrepancy between the desire of those in power to redistribute and hand out money to society, on the one hand, and the economy’s inability to produce the foundation from which such redistribution can take place, on the other. The end result has always been borrowing and lulling public attention to sleep.