Digesting Boric's marathon speech

CHILE - In Brief 06 Jun 2023 by Robert Funk

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President Gabriel Boric delivered his second state of the union speech last week. These speeches tend to offer summaries of accomplishments and lists of promises for the future, often sprinkled with figures and statistics. There was some of that on 1 June – certainly a lot of promises. But it seems that the main point of the record-breaking 216 minute speech lay elsewhere. After the left’s loss of control of the Constitutional Council, Boric, once again, pivoted towards pragmatism. Among the promises were a pledge to reduce hospital waiting lists by 40%, increased spending on mental health, policing, education. There were the usual promises to increase cash transfers to help the neediest families get through the winter. And the president made special mention of the ‘historic debt’ to public school teachers, a long-standing demand made by roughly 76,000 public school teachers who claim that the educational reforms of the 1980s, transferring responsibility for public schools from the central government to municipalities, left them with thousands in unpaid compensation. The promises came with small print. Certainly the shopping list of proposed policy is expensive: the increase in police and security, for example, is priced at USD 1.5 bn. Boric repeatedly underscored that none of these would be possible without the financing made available through his proposed tax reform, a bill that is stuck in Congress. Moreover, the government appears to be counting on revenues based on its 2.5% of GDP calculation of what the reform would raise, a figure that few people believe is accurate even if the full bill were to be approved. Boric also appeared to move the goalposts: the tax ref...