Catalonia is one of the autonomies in which the State executed less than 50% of the investment approved in the budgets for the year 2021. In the community of Madrid, almost double what was planned was spent. These data should not be the object of any kind of demagoguery, neither political nor media. There is no known conspiracy within the State Administration or among officials to prevent the execution of these investments. Nor is it serious to include works in the budgets to scratch or cast a few votes in Congress knowing that they cannot be executed. Nor launch a general criticism of Catalan society for demanding that these infrastructures meet the environmental requirements approved by the EU when we do not even know which projects have not been executed or for what reasons. Nor is it acceptable that record figures are proclaimed in the approval and then accounts are not rendered transparently. All these approaches are somewhat childish and do not help to solve the problems but to obtain political profit from their existence..
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Said the former president of the Cercle d’Economia, José Manuel Lara that politicians were obliged to be predictable. Not only them, but also companies and institutions. Public investment is the engine of private investment and its realization unleashes a multitude of projects that cannot be at the risk of non-compliance and, even less so, of obscurantism. The arrival of a train line or the opening of an access determines the installation of an industry, the start-up of a service or the urban development of a territory. If it is not known if a third or double of a project is going to be executed in the next 12 months, it generates, mainly, uncertainty, paralysis. And that is much more decisive than the grievance that one or the other can attribute to win votes. To say that the pandemic is to blame for what happened in 2021 in Catalonia is to treat people as if they were minorsDidn’t materials become more expensive in other territories or was there no covid-19? Attributing the lack of execution of the investment to the refusal of some Catalan institutions to support certain projects is untrue as long as we do not know what the unexecuted investments are and the reasons that have caused them.
Mature societies like ours have the right to be demanding and, at the same time, must not stop being reasonable, and for this the public powers have the obligation to be transparent. In the 21st century, investment projects, public or private, cannot respond to a swallow or turn the demand into populist demagoguery that says no to everything. To combat both extremes, it is necessary that the projects be predictable and that accountability is not the exception, when it is convenient to make propaganda, but the rule to ensure the progress of people while respecting the planet. From these pages we are always demanding, with transparency and with rational debate. And against the empty grievance, demagoguery and populism, be it political or media. We are predictable.