A Keynesian plan in the hands of liberal economists
Of the measures that the federal government has announced to fight the coronavirus, the most urgent and not yet implemented may be of the voucher for about 38 million informal workers, in the monthly amount of R$600 for three months; and the proposal of provisional measure that will regulate the temporary suspension of job contracts, defining who will pay the millions of workers of very small, small and medium-sized businesses that will be in that regime. A share of those workers' monthly income will probably be paid by the unemployment insurance. Another share will be up to employers, proportionally to their size.
Eight days after the voucher announcement, Congress has not yet passed the proposal. Lawmakers suggested increasing it from the R$200 initially offered by the government to R$500. Yet President Jair Bolsonaro raised it to R$600 with authorization of Economy Minister Paulo Guedes.
The government estimated spending R$22 billion with this aid, which Mr. Guedes called a "citizen check." To reach the R$500, the spending rises to a little over R$45 billion.
Informal workers are people who, because of the social isolation that state governments have decreed to fight the pandemic, lost work conditions and are since then without income even to buy food.
The Chamber of Deputies passed the measure Thursday night, and it will have to go through the Senate before the money reaches the pockets of self-employed workers.
People will have to exercise plenty of patience to wait for that money, if it can reach its recipients still alive.
Meanwhile, the provisional measure of temporary layoffs, which aides say is "practically ready" since last week, has not been sent to Congress yet. Meanwhile, a vast number of people is confined without any income. Officials are asked daily about it, answering that "maybe tomorrow" the MP is ready. They say it only misses some "fine tuning."
The delay in submitting an MP with such reach also owes to the fear that officials, managers and authorizers of expenses have, because they will be individually held accountable for problems of the measure.
The Economy Ministry calculated at R$306.2 billion the total of actions that the government announced until March 25 to tackle the pandemic effects. The first lot of measures amounted to R$147 billion. That included R$23 billion in advances for April of the payment of half of the 13th salary, a year-end bonus, for retirees and other pensioners of the National Social Security...
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