How to reform the State

The last few days have been full of news about the disaster that is our State. For those who have doubts about what needs to be reformed, all they need to do is read, watch or listen to the reports that reach us from the most critical sectors that the State is supposed to manage and where most of our tax money is spent. Let's start with housing. The problem that is on the priorities of all parties and the last governments. Program after program. Measure after measure. No results are being seen. House prices continue to rise sharply and rents are not even worth mentioning. The most recent data from the National Statistics Institute is there to prove it. They will tell me that the problem cannot be solved overnight. That it takes time and manpower to build new houses. All right. But is it really so difficult for the State and local authorities to organize themselves to at least identify what their heritage is spread across the country, in many cases deteriorating? If they can't do this, which is simple, how will they be able to do the rest, which is complicated? If they did this, they could make a big difference in a short space of time in addressing the huge shortage of affordable rental housing. All they had to do was get some people to identify them. It's easy, it's cheap and it helps a lot to solve a huge problem. In another sector, another accounting problem. The country woke up shocked by the result of an external audit that the Minister of Education commissioned from a consultancy firm, to determine a fact that should be simple: how many students in public schools are or have been without a teacher? The conclusion of the study: it is impossible to know. The services of the gigantic and hyper-centralist Ministry of Education are not organized to know the scale of the biggest problem facing the sector. It is fair to ask if they can't do this, what are they doing there? The conclusion is simple: over the years, and as the shortage of teachers worsened, the ministry responsible for solving the problem was in the dark. The unions too. And everyone covered themselves up in the lies they told, throwing out numbers to the public that, after all, no one can evaluate. If the Ministry of Education were less concerned with interfering in everything that schools should or should not do or teach and were more concerned with doing what no school can do, that would already represent a major reform worthy of the name. It seems simple.

Finally, health. The latest report from the Public Finance Council reveals the disaster: in 2024, the deficit in the sector reached an all-time high, since it began to grow again in 2015. The Passos Coelho government had balanced the accounts, complying with an imposition by the troika. It was short-lived. The reform that external creditors imposed on the country and which was successful, without this meaning the chaos in health that we are witnessing today, was reversed as soon as the contraption led by António Costa came to power. Since then, the NHS has been deteriorating visibly, with the various socialist governments boasting of huge budgetary increases. Last year, with the AD government partly responsible, the deficit reached a record 1.3 billion euros. Do you feel, dear reader, any change for the better? No, not at all. So let's just take this example: 460 million was spent on 18 million hours of overtime. Perhaps improving the organization and especially the salaries of health professionals, distinguishing them from the rest of the public sector, would reduce costs and greatly improve the service provided. There was no better reform than this.