Budgets and prophets 2023/09/29 | Excelsior

That is why we can use the clues. For example, when we arrive at a restaurant we have never been to, all we have to do is go to the bathrooms to assume how the kitchens are cared for and hygienic. We will immediately know that if what is seen is not cared for, what is not seen will be worse. If your toilets lead us to disgust, let's be sure that your pots would lead us to garbage. If we still have time, let's go out without eating. If there is no remedy, let's try to forget.

A more complicated example occurs when we want to know a person's background. If we ask him directly, we will never be sure of his candor. But if we ask him what he admires and what he despises in another person, he will inadvertently give us an accurate portrait of himself. If in the other you admire his patriotism, his kindness or his honesty, we can trust him. If in the other you admire his money, his audacity or his ambition, let's take care of our wallet.

Thus, a good prophet of politics is the cabinet. Teams imply message and forecast. A ratification in the economy portfolio announces continuity in the economic models. An interparty compromise in the justice portfolio indicates that this administration is not interested in justice. An indecipherable designation denotes that the designator does not understand or does not want to be understood.

But the infallible prophet is the budget. If a government haggles over justice, it is because it is not interested in justice. In the face of this, there is no speech or promise that is valid. If you save on education or health, you are not interested in the present or the future of your people. That method of analysis never fails.

The same thing happens even in a family. If you spend more on trips than on schools, more on cosmetics than on food, more on drinks than on medicines, we will already know that you are more interested in image, fun and the moment than in essence, seriousness or the future. We won't have to ask them anything to know who they really are and what they really are like.

I clarify that there have always been rulers who have seen justice as a wasteful branch of the budget and who have believed that education and health are burdensome dependencies of the government. That is not new and I know it because I suffered it in several six-year terms. What is new is that before they did not boast of their budgets in matters of justice and it seems that now they even boast of them.

The budget bureaucrats think that punishing the court punishes the judges, which is like thinking that punishing the hospital punishes the doctors or that punishing the university punishes the rector. Only true statesmen know that criminals, students and the sick are really being punished.

That is why Ricardo Sodi says that there are rulers who promise to save, no matter what the cost. And that is why 120 years ago, in the splendor of the Porfiriato, Justo Sierra, Minister of Education and Justice, told the Minister of Finance, José Yves Limantour, that those who thought of justice and education as two budgetary burdens, very They would soon be swept away and erased by history. And it turned out that very soon they were erased and swept away!

Each prophet guesses by looking at the human team and the spending budget. This will tell you more about each ruler than all his speeches and all his reports. He does not waste much time in hearing what they promise us or in listening to what they brag to us.

Tell me who you hang out with and what you spend on, to tell you who you are.