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The cuckoo and the spoiled children. Children (and many older ones) have a strong resistance, or inertia, to adopt "good habits", so that, once the limits that make it possible to handle the "key" of gratifications ("you are not going to go to play balls", or, in modern language: "I don't authorize the cell phone"), and until children are, or have not reached a certain maturity, an effective resource is usually (or used to be) "the man of the bag", or the cuckoo: "Look, the cuckoo appears to you".

This resource had a certain effectiveness among the docile children, who were frightened by imagining the presence of the cuckoo and chose to obey. However, there is another group of children, the spoiled or poorly learned (along with the adults who behave as such), who although they are intimidated by the presence of the cuckoo, do not react by "obeying", but with shouts and kicks with their paws. who express their horror at the same time as their rejection of the cuckoo option.

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an immature country

In other notes, the difference between a "young" country and an "immature" country had been raised. For many of us, Argentines belong to the category of "young country", which would explain our recurrent and endemic ravings and "blunders". The problem is that the United States is not many years older than us as an independent nation and no one would dare to call it a "young country." Not to mention Israel, which has the same years of life as our inflation, and went from not existing as a formal nation to being an economic, technological and military power, having also suffered a ferocious inflation that has already been overcome. Clearly then, we are not a "young" country, but rather an "immature" one.

This immaturity is manifested, among other attitudes, in maintaining a schizophrenic behavior with respect to the Economy, which proposes that people's needs are practically infinite, while our resources are limited. The part of the quasi-infinite needs can be seen in relation to car trunks, which, even though they have more space, do not therefore contain less packages: the larger, the more things inside. On the resource side, it is clear that the day has only 24 hours, of which we cannot apply to work that provides us with income much more than 8, so inevitably those of us who come to our homes are limited. As well; We are unable to understand this second part of the Economy (the one with limited income), despite the fact that, with respect to the first (the one with almost infinite needs), we "fly", which gives a clear idea of ​​our immaturity as a society, manifested especially in the conduct of our governments.

The IMF and the grocer

Once we have exhausted the "cards", our salary and credit, we only have "the corner store", the one that, with good will, entrusts us... until inevitably it also cuts off our credit. Then our good grocer says the awful words, "I'm sorry, but until you catch up, you can't carry any more stock."

Deadly offense. "What do you think?...".

However, once we master our pride, we come back, a little willing to pay something, and a little to see if he changed his mind: "How can we fix it?" Our grocer, aware of this type of situation, tells us: "Prepare a little list with the income you receive monthly, and the expenses for the month as well, and bring it to me; between the two of us we'll see how you can pay...". Does it sound like the reader friend?

Let's change the grocer for the IMF, and the client for Argentina and we have visualized the problem. Clearly, when the grocer receives "the little list", he finds that there are two lines for income, and fifty pages for expenses... Without a doubt, "the numbers (and pages) do not add up".

Costs need to be cut...

Surely, without the need for bombastic postgraduate degrees in Economics, Finance and Dressmaking, our readers will have already guessed where the problem lies. It is necessary to reduce expenses, and in the case of Argentina there is no reason to go to "savage adjustments", of the type of firing one or several million public employees.

Instead, it would be enough to go back to the eight ministries of the presidencies that showed excellent performances, in addition to freezing vacancies and eliminating reserved expenses, travel, per diems and all the ostentatious and frivolous expenses of the "political class" (remember the infinite Argentine delegation recently, speaking with a single representative of "the empires"...), without losing sight of the fact that a Congress with fewer deputies would also probably work, since, although the sampling recommends that the sample should be proportional to the population, it does not it is less true that a few "stratified teaspoons" of the salt flats provide us with an excellent representation of their mineral makeup. Without prejudice to the necessary and healthy "pruning" of unsustainable expenses, the performance of the public sector can also be improved with an economic program that gives the private sector certainty that "the political class" has reached its maturity, promoting policies that encourage investments, instead of "fighting capital".

With this, it would be possible -nothing less!- to increase tax collection through greater exports and economic activity (even reducing rates and withholdings), encouraging, among other activities, greater food production, which would create jobs and improve the diet of many Argentines.

roman memories

"How long, Catilina, will you abuse our patience?" With these words, Cicero, approximately in the 60s before Jesus Christ, in Rome, began the first of his four "catilinarias", rightly denouncing Catilina, who promoted a coup of State. In our case, "patience" should run out in the face of the repeated reiteration of the same errors that lead us, over and over again, to economic crises translated into the impossibility of the economy growing, while inflation persists and the state is seen as prevented from paying their bills, which generates either "defaults", or the dreaded "adjustments", which instead of being done as proposed, eliminating unnecessary, superfluous and contrary to republican austerity expenses, are carried out by eroding the purchasing power of the income of retirees and sectors that cannot update them according to inflation. It is time, therefore, to denounce our "Catilina", which is none other than the perverse populism that, due to political immaturity or calculation, insists on proposing “less” of the same, keeping us in this decades-long decadence. This policy design, functional to corporations that have the ability to modify prices and incomes compared to other sectors that cannot, must change, transforming our closed and uncompetitive economy into an economy open to the world, with generous exports. which, as has already been proven in other periods of our economy, were the ones that gave us prosperity, also offering our ancestors opportunities to improve their meager living conditions in Europe and other latitudes. Let's not fear the grocer or the IMF: let's fear our immaturity as a country!