Final Word from Wednesday, September 20, 2006
No one gets more credit for stating the obvious than the Czech National Bank. Vice Gov. Luděk Niedermayer made the international news by saying that the 2007 state budget proposal is the worst and most dangerous in recent years, but couldn't the same have been said of almost every budget since the founding of the CR in 1993? The 2007 deficit is an accumulation of policies and non-policies that can be traced to the pre-1990 Communists; to the mid-1990s laissez-voler politics of ODS; to the CNB's own easy-license giveaways; to the big-spending years of Miloš Zeman and his successors; and to the EU, Nato and other international institutions that gave negative reinforcement to the Czechs all those years. The budget problem has been a real community effort! What's missing is a concrete action plan from the blame-throwers for undoing the damage they've all caused. [Czech Republic Governor ČSSD deficit laissez-faire]