For years, the discussion about public spending in Argentina was presented as a technical problem. There was talk of deficits, of items, of percentages of GDP, as if the State were a poorly managed Excel spreadsheet. But that look, comfortable and superficial, avoided the essential. The expense is not an accounting error. It is a tool of power. And understanding that completely changes the axis of the debate.
In recent days, the Government has advanced in a new phase of reducing spending in all ministries, with explicit goals that include cuts in current spending and a strong pruning of capital expenditure. The news was presented by the media as just another economic measure, a sign of fiscal discipline. But to reduce it to that is to not understand what is really at stake
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Because this is not economics. It's a philosophy of power.
For decades, Argentine politics built its dominance on a simple but devastating premise: spending to control. Each weight assigned wasn't just a resource, it was a relationship of dependency. Subsidies, transfers, oversized structures, unnecessary public employment. Everything was part of a framework that did not seek efficiency, but rather subordination. The citizen was not a free subject. It was a conditioned receiver.
In this scheme, public spending operated as the main mechanism of domination. It wasn't about solving problems, it was about managing them. It was not intended to eliminate poverty, but to manage it. Growth was not promoted, but dependence. And in that model, the politician became an essential intermediary between the individual and his own survival
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Therefore, every time we talk about “cruel adjustment”, we should stop for a second and ask: cruel to whom? Because what is under discussion is not a number, it's an incentive system. Trimming doesn't remove rights. Eliminate privileges. It does not punish society. Disarm the structure that lived on it.
The cleavage is clear, although many try to disguise it. On the one hand, those who defend a State that spends to perpetuate itself, even if that means suffocating the productive sector and condemning entire generations to dependence. On the other, a different, uncomfortable, disruptive logic: the idea that spending must be limited because power must be
limited.
In that sense, adjustment is not an end in itself. It is a means. It is the tool through which a logic deeply rooted in Argentina begins to be reversed: that of the politician who decides on resources that he does not generate, distributes benefits that he does not finance and builds power with other people's money
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To reduce spending is, in the final analysis, to give back to the citizen what is theirs. It is to reduce the margin of discretion of those who for years operated without limits. It is to break with the idea that the State is about to expand indefinitely, regardless of the cost that this has on individual freedom
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Of course, this process generates resistance. It couldn't be any other way. Each cutout exposes interests. Each pruning reveals structures that were not designed to serve, but to be supported. And in the face of that, the reaction is predictable: dramatization, complaints, construction of apocalyptic stories. “Cruel adjustment” is not a description. It's a strategy.
But what is happening is something else. It is, for the first time in a long time, an attempt to put a concrete limit on Leviathan. Not from the speech, but from the facts. Not from the promise, but from the execution.
And therein lies the true dimension of the moment. It's not just a matter of sorting public accounts. It's about altering a power relationship. It's about moving from a model based on dependency to one based on autonomy.
Adjustment, in this context, ceases to be a bad word to become what it really is: the starting point of a deeper transformation. One in which the State ceases to be the center and the individual returns to the place he should never have lost
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