Fiscal anchor to end the politics of privilege

For years, in Argentina, the fiscal deficit was spoken of as if it were a technical variable, another number on a payroll that could be corrected with greater or lesser administrative expertise. But that view, functional to the status quo, concealed what is essential. The deficit was not a mistake. It was a mechanism. A systematic way of expanding political power over the lives of citizens.

In that scheme, the State didn't spend because it could. I could because I spent. Each peso of deficit meant more debt, more issuance, more present or future taxes. And, above all, more dependence. The deficit was the perfect tool of a caste that needed to finance its own political reproduction while disciplining society through the scarcity it generated.

For this reason, what is happening today in Argentina cannot be read in an accounting key. The consolidation of the fiscal surplus is not just another economic fact. It's a regime change. It is the breaking point of a system that for decades turned the State into a machine of domination financed by

legalized plunder.

The surplus, in this new context, ceases to be a technical goal and becomes a political limit. A real limit. Because when the State stops spending more than it has, it also stops expanding its capacity to intervene, to condition, to buy will. Fiscal balance doesn't just sort the accounts. Order the power

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This is the core of Javier Milei's model. And that is precisely what the opposition cannot — nor does it want to — understand. Because what is at stake is not a discussion about budgetary items. It's the loss of a central control tool. Without a deficit, there is no discretionary fund.

Without cash, there is no policy understood as the sharing of privileges.

For years, populism built its legitimacy on fiction. That of a generous State that redistributed wealth. But that wealth never belonged to the State. It was always the Argentinian people who produce, invest and work. The deficit was, in fact, the mechanism by which that wealth was expropriated to sustain parasitic political structures

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Today, that logic is beginning to be reversed. The fiscal surplus implies that the State ceases to appropriate resources that do not belong to it. It implies, in concrete terms, giving back to the citizen the fruit of their efforts. And that, in an Argentina used to systematic looting, is no less.

It's revolutionary.

The reaction of the traditional political system is not surprising, then. They speak of adjustment, of insensitivity, of social crisis. They are trying to reinstall the narrative that fiscal balance is incompatible with welfare. But what they are really defending is not the vulnerable sectors.

They defend their own survival.

Because the deficit was their tool. It was the fuel of a model based on privilege, brokerage and dependence. Without this fuel, politics loses its capacity to discipline and to condition.

And for the first time in decades, citizens are no longer being held hostage.

Consolidating the fiscal surplus, then, is not the end of the road. It is the beginning of a new phase. One in which the State ceases to be the black hole that devours resources and becomes — for the first time — a limited, limited structure, subordinated

to society.

In that sense, the real divide in Argentina today is not between adjustment and growth. It's between order and populism. Between a State that respects limits and one that systematically violates them to perpetuate itself in power

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Milei isn't doing bookkeeping. He is doing politics in the deepest sense of the term. It's redefining the rules of the game. And in doing so, it is touching the very heart of the system that for decades made Argentina an unviable country

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The surplus is not a number. It's a border. A line that separates two country models. On the one hand, the planned disorder of populism. On the other, order as a condition of freedom.

And for the first time in a long time, that line is beginning to be drawn in favor of citizens.