The investor and economic analyst Marc Vidal has denounced in the section Emergency exit from ‘Herrera in COPE’ that the structure of public spending in Spain is “inherited and blocked.”
According to Vidal, the increase in tax collection and employment growth do not translate into better public services because the system prioritizes current commitments, such as indexed pensions, over strategic investment, reducing GDP investment from 5% to 3% today.
“GDP is growing above the European average and employment is at its highest, but waiting lists are lengthening, structural delays are accumulating, infrastructure is deteriorating and housing is becoming increasingly distant from the middle class,” says the expert.
An indexed system, but “without direction”
Vidal explained to Carlos Herrera that, despite the fact that the GDP is growing and employment is at its highest, the quality of public services, waiting lists, infrastructure and justice is deteriorating structurally.
For the analyst, the problem lies in the fact that a growing proportion of state spending is “shielded”, especially with regard to pensions, which converts expenses that should be punctual into structural ones.
“The extended budget has become an inertia that only reproduces the past instead of building the future,” said Vidal. This budgetary paralysis prevents, in his opinion, the State from proposing a robust growth strategy, limiting itself to collecting through inherited instruments while the ship sails “without direction.”
The weight of demographics on quotes
Population aging acts as an amplifier of this problem, increasing spending on health, dependency and, above all, on pensions. Vidal emphasizes that Spain is carrying out a “regressive intergenerational redistribution”, where the contributions of the active population finance a system that barely invests in its own future.
“The population finances a system that invests less and less in its future because it is eaten up by the present,” stated the investor.
Added to this scenario are political incentives linked to the electoral cycle and population growth based on immigration that, without a proportional investment in services, ends up degrading public benefits for everyone.
From public capital to resource consumption
Marc Vidal’s analysis concludes that Spain has gone from investing 5% of GDP to the current 3%, even taking into account the arrival of European funds. This means that the country is not accumulating public capital, but consuming it.
For the expert, the risk is not only the lack of resources, but the absence of a political decision about which country model to finance. Without approved budgets that act as a strategic tool, the system becomes empty from within, replacing the capacity for growth with spending inertia that compromises long-term sustainability.