Former President of the Republic Cavaco Silva said on Thursday that he did not have enough information about “the degree of fiscal illusion and fiscal anesthesia” of the 2024 state budget, refusing to comment on the document.
At the entrance to the presentation of the book by lawyer and former PSD leader António Pinto Leite, “There are no free lives”, Aníbal Cavaco Silva was asked about the government’s budget proposal for next year, which was presented on Tuesday.
“You know very well that I am not a budget commentator and, furthermore, I do not have sufficient information about the degree of illusion and fiscal numbness present in this budget and in its public presentation. That’s why I can’t tell you anything. about the”he claimed.
When asked whether there is an illusion in this budget, the former Prime Minister and leader of the PSD reiterated this “the concepts of fiscal illusion and fiscal anesthesia are very important when analyzing the public presentation of a budget”.
Cavaco Silva explained that these concepts come from an Italian academic of the early 20th century, Amilcare Puviani, who considered them essential for analyzing the presentation of a budget.
“They always come to mind because I did an in-depth study on illusion and fiscal anesthesia in my dissertation”he said.
According to an article by the President of the Public Finance Council, Nazaré da Costa Cabral, quoting the Italian academic mentioned by Cavaco: “the budgetary illusion occurs when government revenues and the associated budgetary efforts are not immediately noticed by taxpayers, which on the part of the government in the sector in question stimulates an increase in public expenditure covered by those same revenues”.
In other scholarly articles, the concept of fiscal illusion is equated with that of “Tax anesthesia in taxpayers, which occurs when taxpayers have a distorted view of the relationship between the taxes they actually pay and the taxes they think they pay”.
António Pinto Leite’s book will be presented by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and attended by former Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, former Deputy Prime Minister Paulo Portas, former Minister of the Socialist government Pedro Siza Vieira, the State Councilor and former leader of the CDS-PP António Lobo Xavier or the current ‘vice’ of the Christian Democrats Paulo Núncio.
Source: DN
