NewsWhore
01-03-2007, 04:10 PM
To end the year, Adriano Miguel Tejada of Diario Libre wrote about the "politicocracy" that prevails in the DR today. He writes on the predominance of politicians:
"Any economic model that is based on a government as the engine of the economy and all national activities, can only lead to an endless series of fiscal reforms needed to levy taxes from the population and impoverish it further each day. That is what has been happening in our country.
"The problem is that the government does not generate money and it needs to extract an increasingly greater quota from taxpayers in order to finance all its programs and keep its growing payroll.
"That quota creates a vicious circle in which the private sector invests less and less because of all the obstacles and costs of doing so, and consequently the government is becoming more and more indispensable at an even greater cost to the economy in general.
"All that takes place without solving any of the fundamental problems, even its own corruption that has created a political class with a great accumulation of wealth that makes it independent of the country's traditionally powerful forces. The politicians have become first class citizens, owners of the infrastructure and controllers of instruments of political power. The result is a caricature of democracy and its conversion into a kind of "politicocracy" in which political values and political matters permeate all activity and have become the dominating values."
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#9)
"Any economic model that is based on a government as the engine of the economy and all national activities, can only lead to an endless series of fiscal reforms needed to levy taxes from the population and impoverish it further each day. That is what has been happening in our country.
"The problem is that the government does not generate money and it needs to extract an increasingly greater quota from taxpayers in order to finance all its programs and keep its growing payroll.
"That quota creates a vicious circle in which the private sector invests less and less because of all the obstacles and costs of doing so, and consequently the government is becoming more and more indispensable at an even greater cost to the economy in general.
"All that takes place without solving any of the fundamental problems, even its own corruption that has created a political class with a great accumulation of wealth that makes it independent of the country's traditionally powerful forces. The politicians have become first class citizens, owners of the infrastructure and controllers of instruments of political power. The result is a caricature of democracy and its conversion into a kind of "politicocracy" in which political values and political matters permeate all activity and have become the dominating values."
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#9)