Posted on 09/29/2012 11:47:49 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
The Spanish government on Thursday unveiled spending cuts worth 0.77 percent of GDP for its 2013 draft budget, in a move to meet deficit-reduction targets.
Spain's government ministries saw their budgets slashed by 8.9 percent for next year, as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's battle to reduce one of the euro zone's biggest deficits was made harder by falling tax revenues in a prolonged recession.
However, the conservative government said tax revenue would be higher in 2012 than it had been originally budgeted for and would grow by a further 3.8 percent in 2013.
Spending cuts would be worth 0.77 percent of gross domestic product in 2013, while adjustment in revenue would be worth 0.56 percent of GDP.
"This is a crisis budget aimed at emerging from the crisis ... In this budget there is a larger adjustment of spending than revenue," Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria told a news conference after a marathon six-hour cabinet meeting.
She added that 58 percent of the savings were to be made by cutting budgets and the other 42 percent by boosting revenues.
Saenz also announced the creation of an “independent budget authority” to control public finances.
Spain, the euro zone's fourth largest economy, is at the centre of the crisis. Investors fear that Madrid cannot control its finances and that Rajoy does not have the political will to take all the necessary but unpopular measures.
Madrid is talking to Brussels about the terms of a possible European aid package that would trigger a European Central Bank bond-buying programme and ease Madrid's unsustainable borrowing costs.
Saenz de Santamaria said the government would included 43 new laws to reform the economy over the next six months.
It will also present reforms to the pension system by year-end.
Uncertainty over the timing of an aid request and divisions within the European Union over a plan to create a banking union sent the yield on Spain's 10-year bond on Thursday to its highest since the ECB announced its bond-buying plan on Sept. 6.
"The first impression is good, heading towards a major adjustment in spending rather than in revenues," said Jose Luis Martinez of Citigroup, in Madrid.
"However, we see as too optimistic the macroeconomic assumption of 0.5 percent recession for the next year. We see a scenario with a deeper recession and if this were the case, further spending cuts will be needed".
Rajoy is dreaming.
I don't believe talk of "cuts" until I see that the future number is measurably smaller than the past number.
“Spain’s government ministries saw their budgets slashed by 8.9 percent for next year,”
A WHOLE 8.9 percent counts as “slashed”? It’s the same all over, I guess. Any cut to bureaucratic budgets is a “slash”, an increase that is less than what they planned is a “cut”
I wonder what they will call the inevitable 25% or 40% cuts that are coming?
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