In the first century of our era Quintiliano wrote that "although ambition is in itself a bad habit it is, frequently, cause of virtues." And Miguel de Unamuno, with his habitual expertise, prevailed from "set your sights high, the highest that you can, higher still, beyond your view, where our parallel lives will be: aim for the inaccessible."
In 1997 it seemed inaccessible and impossible to reach the healthy budgetary balance in the government accounting. Such an impossibility has become reality now. The task seemed impossible with the deficit around 6-7% of GDP. There had to be a Herculean effort in the adjustment in order to enter in the so wanted Monetary Union. With the successful and definitive appearance of the Euro, we are now enjoying the benefits of the application of an orthodox policy in line with the clear benchmarking of the economy of supply.
But it is not enough. It is necessary to be ambitious in that which we estimate is the best. And the best is not only budgetary equilibrium when we know that it is being achieved due to the increase in revenues because of the spurt of economic activity, the decrease in unemployment, the entry into Euro land and, above all, the cut in interest rates that took place which greatly benefited the burden of debt.
The best thing in these circumstances is not only controlling expenses, but also reducing them, convinced that it will strengthen economic activity and employment, which in turn increases revenue collection. The best is to aspire to ample budgetary surpluses that allow the burden of debt to diminish much more quickly because, sooner or later, it will be necessary to do it. It is not good to delight with passivity in the victories, but rather they should serve as an incentive to maintaining tension toward what the economic reality of the markets indicates us to be the good road.
Sometimes, reading the thoughts of some liberal authors, I think that the current economic policy, considered with objective benchmarking and without knowing the previous stage, should be classified as Socialist. If not Socialist, it does maintain countless Socialist tinges. Some of the budgetary politics of these years could be classified as Socialist if we compare them with the one who Schumpeter, in his "History of Economic Analysis," classifies as "the character that rises in history as the greatest English financier in economic liberalism: Gladstone."
For Gladstone whose most spectacular victory was in the budget of 1853, the most important thing was to suppress fiscal obstacles to private activity maintaining public expense at the lowest possible level since the resultant economic development would render that public expense superfluous to a great extent. Gladstone, rightly, considered profit and propensity to saving as the most important factors for generation of economic progress of all social classes. In the word all the most underprivileged are especially included.
Taxes should affect the earnings of the active creators of wealth, the economic agents with the coherence of their social, political and economic vision, as little as possible. We have advanced a little in these years of Government of the PP, enough, but the reform has still been stingy. Maybe there is not enough faith in the goodness of new ideas and politics, or maybe there is an excessive fear that citizens do not understand the new measures and that the socio-political conditions of the country to which they should be applied are not the appropriate ones. I believe that this fear is a little absurd, that the Spaniards are able to understand that and much more if the measures are well explained, and that, if we want to aspire to the best, it is necessary to set our sights high in order to be up to the circumstances and without complexes with regard to the rest of Europe.

José Juan Franch Menéu
Business Gazette, September 26th 2002