There are mining companies, banks and other private parties who would be glad to step in and assume sovereign governmental roles. President Mulino seems not to be the sort of chump to go along with that. Panama’s businesses are in their great majority tiny and informal, but those aren’t the folks to whom the men in suits want to hand control of public affairs. Photo by Eric Jackson.
Why Panama has no 2025 national budget
President Mulino, recognizing a debt squeeze, tells us that it’s time for some government belt-tightening. Most members of the National Assembly, starting with deputies of the president’s coalition and including especially those of the defeated PRD and their allies, have other ideas. They want to continue the spending binge of the previous five years – family, friends and mistresses on the payroll, sticky fingers in the cash boxes, no-show “employees” whose pay goes to their sponsors and all of that. Panama can’t afford it.
It would help if Mulino had a minister of economy and finance who knows and respects the legal constraints and imperatives of a national budget, but he didn’t give us one of those, either.
What to do? President Mulino should call a special legislative session to do what the deputies and the administration’s budget people usually get done in October, so that we have a sound and well-considered national budget, hammered out in a process that allows line-item vetoes of any of the usual wise guy stuff, without time pressures to go along.
There just isn’t any good reason why the Panamanian government should start 2025 without an adequate – if modest – and well-considered national budget in place. Let’s take the time, do the work and get it right.
Harris, obviously
Were we to have nothing positive to say about Kamala Harris, she would be a clearly superior choice for US president just because Donald Trump is so deficient. Dishonest, cruel, boastful,racist, annoying to the leader of traditional US allies, but above all proven to be incompetent at the job he once had, the choice is whether to vote for someone who can actually defeat him of cast a protest vote for somebody who will not be the next president.
Kamala Harris is circumspect and on some important issues it would be nice if she were more outspoken and commital. But then again, she is vice president of the United States. She does not live in the White House or work in the Oval Office, has no power to sign or veto laws, can’t issue executive orders. She is the nation’s number two public official, no matter all the MAGA lies. Her job is to preside over the US Senate, be ready to assume the presidency if need be, and carry out various of the assignments Joe Biden might give her.
At the president’s direction, did she work with Republicans willing and able to lend a hand, and leaders and experts from the various relevant agencies to craft a border bill that would strengthen enforcement and correct flaws in current laws and policies? That she did, and sight unseen, Donald Trump ordered its defeat by House Republicans. ‘See – she didn’t get anything done,’ they whine. Let’s not be taken for fools.
A senator, the attorney general of California and a county prosecutor, on her way up to her current office the vice president has shown herself to be an intellectually and morally serious person, capable of making the hard decisions. On a number of international assignments. Harris has come to know the lay of the diplomatic world and many of its key players. She’s ready to be president and she should be elected to that office.
Voters need to deploy all their honesty to resist the onslaught of the parties and should never adopt any other guide than their conviction of the merits of the citizens they have decided to elect.
Justo Arosemena
Bear in mind…
After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
Evelyn Underhill
Humor is also a way of saying something serious.
T. S. Eliot
Even though many Mexicans do not fully agree with our project, we will have to walk in peace and harmony to continue building a fair and more prosperous Mexico.
Claudia Sheinbaum
Contact us by email at thepanamanews@gmail.com
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
These links are interactive — click on the boxes
