Não existe produtividade que resista a esses casos extremos de prodigalidade (ou irresponsabilidade) com os recursos coletivos...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
In Britain, Austerity Collides With Pension System
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
The New York Times, September 20, 2012
Dr. Lipman’s annual government pension of £48,000, or nearly $78,000, nicely supplements the £144,000 tax-free payment he received when he retired from Britain’s National Health Service in 2007 after 35 years of service.
He also makes use of the wide menu of universal benefits available to older Britons — including free bus travel and annual payments of £200, or $324, to defray winter heating costs. Next month, when he turns 65, he will qualify as well for a second government pension payout of £104 a week, plus a £10 bonus at Christmas.
Dr. Lipman’s payments are emblematic of what Britain’s Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, is up against, having hitched his political fortunes to the coalition government’s ability to cut the national budget. Despite Mr. Cameron’s efforts to curb public outlays and reduce one of Europe’s biggest budget deficits, government spending is higher than when he took office two years ago. This continues a climb that began with the creation of the British welfare state after World War II.
The cuts Mr. Cameron has made — a public sector pay freeze, a reduction in outlays for local governments and cutbacks in personnel at government ministries, to name a few — have drawn howls of protest. The outcry has come from unions; the Labor Party, which now has a strong lead in the polls; and even a growing faction of Tory-supporting business leaders.
But overall government spending, as a portion of the economy, continues to rise. It is projected to approach £700 billion this year, or about 45 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 38 percent a decade ago. That is partly a result of social benefits, mainly for the elderly, that are deemed politically off-limits and are being propelled up by a demographic curve that will add millions of Britons to the retiree ranks in coming years.
“Austerity is just not a word that I recognize,” said Dr. Lipman, who since retiring from full-time work as a family doctor in the northern city of Leeds has upgraded the car he drives to a Mercedes. “I would not say that I am worried financially.”
The issue in some ways parallels the challenge facing the United States, where growing numbers of retiring baby boomers threaten to bankrupt theSocial Security and Medicare systems within decades unless those systems are revamped. And as in the United States, because people still working are paying for retirees’ benefits that are more generous than younger people can expect to receive, the budget struggle has elements of a generational dispute.
Younger doctors in Britain do not expect to receive the same benefits as Dr. Lipman. This year they held a one-day strike to protest the government’s decision to raise their retirement age and their pension contributions.
In Britain, “the welfare state can no longer carry this burden,” said Angus Hanton, an economist and a member of the advisory board of the Intergenerational Foundation, which advocates on behalf of younger Britons.
With British tax revenue remaining weak because of an economy that is forecast to shrink 0.5 percent this year, it is becoming ever more likely that Mr. Cameron’s government will miss its goal of cutting the deficit this fiscal year to £120 billion, from £126 billion last year.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that Britain will have a deficit this year of 8.1 percent of G.D.P., surpassing Spain and even Greece and trailing only Ireland among the distressed euro zone economies.
Opposing politicians — and some economists — have accused Mr. Cameron of destroying any chance for economic recovery by sticking to his austerity platform. He faces growing pressure to reverse course.
“We have not gone far enough — you can keep the welfare state as long as you have economic growth, and this is not happening,” said Tim Morgan, an economist at the brokerage firm Tullett Prebon in London who tracks government spending patterns.
For now, many bond investors are disregarding Britain’s deficit. Continuing to see the pound as a haven from woes in the euro zone, they are lending money to Britain for 10 years at an interest rate only slightly higher than Germany’s 1.6 percent.
But at least one hedge fund manager, Ben Davies of Hinde Capital, is betting against British bonds. “The government has this austerity program, but spending and debt continue to increase,” Mr. Davies said. “It’s very disingenuous, and I think by the end of the year the market will question whether the government can truly implement these cuts.”
Leia o resto neste link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/business/global/in-britain-spending-outpaces-austerity.html?pagewanted=2&tntemail1=y&emc=tnt
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California Debt Higher Than Earlier Estimates, a Task Force Reports
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
The New York Times, September 20, 2012
Gov. Jerry Brown of California announced when he came into office last year that he had found an alarming $28 billion “wall of debt” looming over the state, which had to be dismantled.
Since then, he has slowed the issuance ofmunicipal bonds, called for spending cuts and tried to persuade the state’s famously antitax voters to approve a tax increase this fall.
On Thursday, an independent group of fiscal experts said Mr. Brown’s efforts were all well and good, but in fact, the “wall of debt” was several times as big as the governor thought.
Directors of the State Budget Crisis Task Force said their researchers had found a lot of other debts that did not turn up in California’s official tally. Much of it involved irrevocable promises to provide pensions to public workers, health care for retirees, the cost of delayed highway maintenance and an estimated $40 billion bill to bring drinking water up to federal standards.
They also pointed out many of the same unpaid bills from previous years that the governor had brought to light, like $8 billion in delayed payments to schools and community colleges, and $250 million that was raided from a fund dedicated to transportation and treated as revenue.
The task force estimated that the burden of debt totaled at least $167 billion and as much as $335 billion. Its members warned that the off-the-books debts tended to grow over time, so that even if Mr. Brown should succeed in pushing through his tax increase, gaining an additional $50 billion over the next seven years, the wall of debt would still be there, casting its shadow over the state.
“With inadequate information, our legislators and citizens are flying blind,” said David Crane, a board member who issued the task force’s special report on California’s fiscal condition at a news conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
Mr. Crane, a former adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was joined by the economist George P. Shultz, who served various administrations as secretary of treasury, labor and state.
A spokesman for Governor Brown did not dispute the report but said the governor was making progress in his effort to restore fiscal balance.
The task force was founded last year by Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, and Richard Ravitch, a former New York lieutenant governor. They said they were acting out of a deep concern for the fiscal affairs of the states, which they thought received insufficient attention in Washington.
The task force is conducting detailed analyses of a sample of six states. The others are Illinois, New York, Texas, Virginia and New Jersey.
California was of particular interest, not only because it constitutes the world’s ninth-largest economy, but because of its intractable fiscal problems. It has also experienced an unusual string of municipal bankruptcies in recent years. In one of them, the City of Stockton is proposing to walk away from virtually all the principal and interest on one of its bonds.
Analysts are watching the case closely, concerned that if Stockton succeeds, other troubled cities may follow. Some contend that the State of California should be doing more to keep its cities out of bankruptcy, and to shield municipal bond investors.
Task force members said their focus on California was not meant to suggest that the state’s general-obligation bonds were at risk. Mr. Crane said he believed California’s bonds were very safe, acknowledging that he owned some himself.
Governor Brown’s efforts to chip away at the debt have led Standard & Poor’s to say it is considering an upgrade of California’s bond rating, long one of the lowest among the states. But the report pointed out that S.& P.’s review of California’s creditworthiness took into account a ranking in the state Constitution that shows which debts and government programs must be paid ahead of everything else.
While a rating increase would mean that California’s bondholders were more secure, it would not necessarily mean more money for the programs that didn’t make it onto the seniority list. Nor would it reflect any particular improvement in the fiscal health of the cities, school districts and other local bodies of government, which fall lower in the pecking order than the state’s general-obligation bondholders.
