Budget Deficits For Whom, Deficit Spending For What

Reference to the News Article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer here:

5-month budget deficit hits P22.79B

There's cause and reason to be skeptical about this.... In principle, I am for deficit spending, and I made this argument when the PNoy administration registered a surplus in its first year in office. But then we have to ask: deficit for whom, and what for? I am all for deficit spending for boosting our mode of 'production' in employment-generating and job-creating projects, and also for the workers, the poor, and those vulnerable to become poor.

In this news article, it says that government spending has been primarily 'driven by MOOE' — that is, mainly for maintenance, rather than spending on new public facilities. My worry is that our government's economic managers are not Keynesians; most would in fact proudly claim to be neoliberals. As such, this evokes of the nightmare of the old Ramos-style justification for rampant privatization of state assets (i.e., private-public partnerships [PPP] under PNoy) to offset the deficits and that was said to be instrumental to the attainment of years of budget surpluses in the mid-1990s. 

As always, vigilance is necessary. 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'.