Inability is: having money and not being able to spend it. The Emilia Romagna case. Do you prefer debt or the budget surplus?
We have to cite an article by Open which, when it's not a fact checker, gets it right. The piece in question brings out the budget of the Region for the years 2021-22, as per the report of the Court of Auditors:
Between 2021 and 2022, the regional council of Emilia Romagna with president Stefano Bonaccini and vice president Elly Schlein returned to the Ministry of Infrastructure 55.2 million euros of a loan of 71.9 million euros received from the State for the maintenance and the safety of watercourses in the Region. The money, as reported by the Court of Auditors in its 2021 and 2022 reports on Emilia Romagna, has been returned because the Region has not been able to spend it on time as established by the loan agreements paid by the State.
What is incapacity? have the funds and have “Budget Surpluses” because you are unable to spend them. Yet maintenance could be done, spillways could be opened and, I assure you, the Apennines are full of landslides to consolidate or slopes to plant. Instead, 77% of the funds received were returned. Now asks the Extraordinary Commissioner, after having protested because the revision of the rules on public spending have raised the spending threshold not to be tendered to 100,000 euros. Ask yourself how many jobs the mountain municipalities could have done, with this money without competition, to consolidate their territories.
Bonaccini then replied by stating:
"Evidently, 'Open' has received news of a finding by the Court of Auditors, dated and in any case already outdated, with respect to funds allocated for navigation on the Po, the Po-Veneto waterway system, in particular for the Ferrara waterway: yes these are resources that have absolutely nothing to do with hydraulic safety and the prevention of instability. In conclusion, Matteo Salvini has news that he has refinanced the lost plan again, repaying the 55 million lost because Emilia Romagna was unable to spend it. "These resources", it is specified, "have already been recovered and are still available to the Region thanks to an agreement with the Ministry, used not by chance for the only intended and admissible purpose: the three-year plan for inland navigation, approved by the regional government in one of the last sessions, which not surprisingly provides for investments of 55 million euros».
Obviously, inland navigation does NOT concern works such as river dredging, an activity that would have been very useful and not only in Ferrara: if the navigability of the Po tributaries had been restored (which existed quietly until the modern age) they would not have been cleaned up the courses of the rivers, made the same regulated, and the banks improved. No, everything would remain as before….
Now I propose a survey. Please reply and spread it:
Do you prefer a public administration that returns 55 million funds and does not do land maintenance work, or a public administration that makes 55 million debts, does useful and important work, and avoids the disastrous floods that have always occurred every generation? Because a guy, Nobel Prize for Economics, said that public debt is not a "Burden" that we leave to our children, but it is the infrastructure that we leave them as a legacy:
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The article Incapacity is: having money and not being able to spend it. The Emilia Romagna case. Do you prefer debt or the budget surplus? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lincapacita-e-avere-i-soldi-e-non-essere-in-grado-di-spenderli-il-caso-emilia-romagna-preferite-i-debiti-o-lavanzo-di-bilancio/ on Thu, 18 May 2023 10:17:31 +0000.