Please, no surprises this time
Budgets are prepared and put to a vote in order to be enacted. Their purpose is not to formally express the optimism or pessimism of the government’s economic team prevailing at the time. They become the law of the land and laws must be fully enforced. The budget that is in force this year was characterized by overly optimistic assessments of the course of revenues, assessments that were disproved in the middle of the year, leading the government to adopt emergency tax measures. This bad precedent should not be repeated in 2009. The economic team must evaluate all the factors that affect the country’s economy without undue optimism. They have a duty to prepare a budget that holds no surprises, because even the slightest change in the figures can have a big impact on the real economy. No one will want to plan ahead and no one will want to invest. Therefore, what we need is a realistic budget proposal so that if there are any surprises in the future, they will only be pleasant ones.
