Zapatero and the Example of Obama

The future president of the United States knows that he is gambling with the economy. He could have taken a bit of a siesta on his popularity and confided in a political hit to prolong the honey moon with the electorate; he could have awarded his most radical followers with populist measures that are more cosmetic than real; he could have recreated himself in the historic event of being the first black president and defined a belligerent position in the extension of civil rights. But he preferred to confront the harsh reality before inventing another chord with his interests. And the reality is that the United States has been recorded to have the highest rate of unemployment in fifteen years, 7.2 percent, having created more than two and a half million unemployed in 2008. This is the principal concern of the Americans and has been his principal concern even before taking office. Obama has provided details of his economic reactivation program and has announced a plan of 800,000 million dollars that contemplates stimulus measures for private investment in future sectors – renewable energies and communication infrastructures – and tax reductions for 300, 000 million dollars. An ambitious plan of fiscal stimulus that aspires to create between three and four million employees in two years (90 percent in the private sector).

What a contrast with our country, where the unemployment rate is practically double that of U.S. and where the Zapatero government continues the squid tactic, creating artificial problems and improvising a radical agenda to deflect the attention of his absolute incapacity to confront the economic crisis. And when he begins to legislate economic material, it only occurs to him to create public posts in the peripheral administrations or to foment the clientele, because he lacks the political courage to propel unpopular but necessary reforms. Obama has announced extraordinary measures for a situation without precedents that sum a deficit of 1.2 billion dollars which will be recorded this fiscal year. On the whole, more than 15 percent of the American GDP, a fiscal impulse that has no precedents, not even in the times of Roosevelt’s New Deal and that of the size of the public sector and the fiscal pressure which were hardly a fourth of what they are today. Not even in this qualified situation of emergency is it permitted to governor by decree or jump over Congress, where his program has begun to be questioned and analyzed till the last minimal detail by senators and congressmen that owe his post to the electorate and neither the mechanism of the party nor the popularity of the President-elect. This is the grandeur of American democracy.

Obama’s employment plan is ambitious and probably will not produce the desired outcome. Its financing is a mystery and is as heavy as a flagstone for the exchange of the dollar in the following years, at the same time as the immense vacuum flows of international capital is occurring. It is going to impede, in spite of its good intentions, additional expenses in some pending reforms such as Social Security. To ensure its execution, it has some of the best North American economists, some of which are members of the Republican Party. It has an unquestionable Keynesian aspect, but does not contain basic errors, not even in its ideological slant which considers that economic laws are a slave to the right. It confides in the private sector and provides the necessary stimuli that mobilize in the achievement of the desired objectives. It utilizes the price and public tariffs system to give incentive to investment in energies without contaminants, without excluding nuclear, and diminishing oil dependency. It entrusts the private sector the provision of communication infrastructure in a country where the last big wave of public investment was more than fifty years ago. Faithful to himself, Obama has opted for the best Keynesian economics. That is his principal characteristic, including when he tries to reduce his protectionist impact. Only time will tell it works or drives the country into debt without precedent and precipitates his decline. But there is no doubt that he has made priorities clear and that he has made them coincide with the objective necessities of the country.