For over five years, discord, disorder, and backwardness have prevailed in Mexico of the 4 T. The country needs precisely the opposite: without harmony, order becomes difficult; without order, progress is impossible; without progress, the country exacerbates its inhabitants’ problems. It is as simple as that. The objective of any government must be the progress of its people.
“Order and Progress”, the motto of Brazil’s national coat of arms, is the abbreviated version of a phrase of the French philosopher and mathematician Auguste Comte, who formulated the doctrine of positivism and somehow coined the term sociology. He once stated: “Love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal”.
In the case of Mexico, it is essential to have concord to agree on a new social pact since the current one is battered, dented, and exhausted. From this point, to impose order, to put an end to the culture of tolerance, to comply and enforce the constitutional mandates without exceptions, to recover for the State the functions and obligations that correspond to it and that have been unduly awarded to criminal groups without objection and with the support of the authorities themselves. In this way, it will be possible to agree on a long-term national project with the next generations in mind, with clearly defined objectives, based on a strategy that considers policies, plans and programs, responsible institutions, and the resources to achieve them.
Social programs are a palliative, not a solution. The ideal is to create the conditions so that their beneficiaries are no longer beneficiaries because they have become self-sufficient. The social policy of the 4T is perverse; it turns beneficiaries into addicts to government support instead of making them productive. It would be a great triumph for any government to end “social programs” -which currently are nothing more than vote-buying mechanisms- because this would imply the disappearance of poverty. The role of government should not be to hand out alms but to create the ideal conditions for its people to prosper.
To this end, it must promote education, provide health services, pursue and control crime and guarantee compliance with the law, facilitate procedures and support the undertaking of productive projects, simplify and streamline the paperwork to comply with civic obligations, provide valuable and efficient infrastructure, strengthen the institutions that guarantee the functioning of democratic processes and accountability, and those that regulate equity in economic activity, using the full force of the State for the benefit of Mexicans.
Increasing tax collection is the only way to solve the severe and growing public deficit. Those who propose tax reform must first convince taxpayers that public resources will be used for functional, necessary works of collective benefit. However, we should not try to collect more only from those who already contribute since, in addition to being a minority proportion of the economically active population, they often suffer from the arbitrary and invasive treatment of the tax authorities.
The current government boasts of a significant increase in tax collection achieved through a policy as close as possible to extortion: the heads of large national and multinational corporations were summoned by the head of the tax collection service (SAT) and prevented from entering the meeting accompanied by their lawyers. Once there. They were threatened with “judicialization” of the cases in litigation at the Tax and Administrative Justice Court; that is, they were threatened with imprisonment if they did not immediately pay the amounts in litigation, with one exception: a businessman who, according to the then head of the SAT, today’s Secretary of Economy, declared that his companies had a balance of unpaid taxes at the beginning of 2021 for more than 40 billion pesos.
In this case, President López Obrador stated in his morning press conference last Monday, March 4, that he offered the businessman a discount of 8 billion pesos (which is prohibited by law) to convince him to pay but the businessman not only not accept it, but mocks him constantly in his social networks. The fear that the President has of this businessman is evident. He has covered up a fraudulent operation in selling a fertilizer company to Pemex, which made him a 625 million-dollar profit. Also, at the beginning of his administration, this businessman profited with the dispersion of multimillion-dollar funds from social programs through his bank, among many other benefits. He must know something really serious about the President.
The challenge for the tax authority in the next administration is to make it very attractive for those who represent the most significant percentage of the economic activity, both businesses, and workers who operate informally, to be fully incorporated into the formal economic system to have access to all the benefits that this represents. If only half of them would do so, the tax collection would almost double. In addition, many in the informal economy already pay a tax, not to the tax authority, but to criminal groups and some officials that extort them. No one rejects offers that facilitate and help improve daily life.
The lack of control of the President’s narrative due to what was published by the New York Times and ProPublica is very noticeable. The hashtag #AMLOnarcopresidente massively reproduced in social networks has occupied not only a very relevant part of the time of his endless morning sermons, but he has even asked the leader of the neighboring country that his government officially disavow what was published; he implies that it is part of a dirty war for the electoral stage, waged by the dark forces of the evil empire controlled by the emissaries of the past.
However, what is undeniable is the massive amount of money in the presidential campaign of his candidate, denounced months ago by one of the contenders who is currently part of her team, and also that every day that passes, information is revealed about the financing of the official party from the diversion of resources intended initially for social programs, and documented in the media how organized crime participates in support of the official party during the elections, as well as the rampant corruption of the children and close associates of the President.
Whoever wins the election will receive a government in bankruptcy, a level of violence that needs to be urgently addressed in large part of the territory, a culture of tolerance that needs to be replaced by one of compliance with the law, a government with mediocre officials who do not comply with a minimum professional profile and who think that being poorly paid justifies them to provide a bad service and to abuse their position to get a stash for the rainy season, almost 40% of the population that lacks access to health services, an economy that during this administration had an average growth of less than 1%, an expenditure budget committed to pay campaign promises and to the payment of interest on a debt that they deny has increased, but that together absorb an amount more significant than what is destined to education, health, and security.
As if that were not enough, their neighbors to the north are rightly aggrieved by massive and illegal migration, if not intentionally to favor a US Presidential candidate, at least without doing anything to prevent it, as well as the smuggling of deadly substances that poison and kill hundreds of thousands. It only remains to be hoped that the electoral process will take place in a civilized environment and that the result will be sufficiently wide enough to avoid a crisis due to a lack of legitimacy. The panorama looks different from outside the National Palace.
SEPGRA Political Analysis Group.
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