| The Minister of Finance demands a compensation fund for the worst-financed communities, the reform of the regional financing system and the same authorized deficit target for the Basque Country | The order to start processing the budgets is published today despite the fact that the central government has not yet communicated the information to set the spending ceiling, the deficit or the indebtedness The regional government has already begun to work on the Community budgets for 2021, "budgets in a crisis scenario whose fundamental objective is to guarantee the provision of quality public services and promote economic and social recovery," according to what the Minister of the Presidency and Finance, Javier Celdrán, after the publication in the Official Gazette of the Region of Murcia (BORM) of the order in which the regulations for the preparation of the budget law for next year are issued. The preparation of these budgets for 2021 begins, as happened last year, without the central government having yet communicated to the communities the information they need for their preparation, such as the estimates of the financing system, the spending rule or the stability target.
"The regional government, in an exercise of responsibility and to build trust, is already working to comply with the forecasts and have the 2021 budgets in time and form, but in the area of ??financing we are subject to a response from the State that we see constantly that it does not arrive, "Celdrán said. In this sense, the Minister of Finance stressed that "although the Region was the second community that had the least impact on its economy due to the health crisis, there is no doubt that the situation of economic and social crisis that we are experiencing will require greater efforts, for what we are going to demand from the Government of Spain to fulfill the debt it has with Murcians and increase our resources so that the Region and its inhabitants have the means they need to be able to maintain the quality public services they deserve.
" In this sense, Celdrán indicated three fundamental ways to increase the Budget "until it is at least equal to that of this year".
The first and most urgent is the creation of a nonreimbursable leveling fund to compensate the worst financed communities "and thus try to end the unjustified and unsupportive differences between territories that break the constitutional principles of equity, justice and territorial balance." Celdrán warned, however, that this fund has to serve on this occasion "to provide the most punished communities with the resources that correspond to us and that have been denying us for more than 10 years, and not to increase the territorial gap and create a Spain of two speeds in which half of the Spaniards lag behind, as has happened with the distribution of the aid fund to face the coronavirus ". Secondly, the counselor demanded the reform of the regional financing system, "an unfair system that punishes and mistreats us as second-rate Spaniards and that has generated almost 9,000 of the nearly 10,000 million in debt of the Community during its more than ten years of validity ".
According to this system, the Region of Murcia is the worst financed community in Spain along with the Valencian Community. Finally, and as an alternative route, the Community will also demand "that in case of not offering the resources that correspond to us by justice, at least the deficit objectives are relaxed, as the central Executive has just done with the Basque Country, fixing it unilaterally by 2.6 percent.
An amount that, at least, should be equal.
" "We do not want to go into debt, we want a fair distribution that provides us with the resources we deserve and that correspond to us, but if those resources do not arrive, it would be a double code and an exercise of cynicism for the Government to maintain the Financial Stability criteria.
We want to prepare the budgets of the reactivation, but if the Government of Sánchez does not act and make arbitrary decisions to benefit only some territories due to political balances, we will be facing crisis budgets, "he concluded.
