Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Buying votes and fake news were a sung ball and spilled milk

It’s a crazy race to figure out how much the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government spent in order to acquire votes. There is a “cockroach flies” in the TSE, drowned by the torrent of “fake news” and other filth. It’s spilled milk, it was sung balls.

In addition, these electoral spending accounts are somewhat naive and reveal a mistaken idea of ​​the effects of government policies. The TSE, for its part, wanted to contain the wave of dirt with a bucket and drank some broth, “hecatomed by the wave of the hangover”, to quote Mario Faustino (poet, 1930-1962).

Election spending accounts look like the accounting of a business over the counter. So much extra money was spent to convince such clientele to vote for Bolsonaro. A bit of last-minute Auxílio Brasil, another of a gasoline subsidy, a few paychecks for the poor (which is already a mistake, because spending is one thing, credit is another). It’s all much worse and bigger.

An example. Certain expenses will extend beyond the election. Electoral spending has increased government debt, thus paying more interest. In this hole we are in, the very increase in debt causes interest rates to rise.

In order to be able to spend more, the government has lowered the spending ceiling since 2021, without putting anything reasonable in place, which even demoralizes future attempts to avoid unlimited debt growth, which is lasting damage, including in the interest rate.

In many government actions, helpful or idiotic, “the consequences come later”, as the old joke goes. Governments are rarely machines for producing good immediate and relevant results (although they can do instant damage, see the conservative and libertarian Liz Truss in the UK).

Promising immediate manna, “electoral” or not, can result in seven biblical years of fatness, followed by seven years of famine. Have we rerun this movie many times? Those who measure the quality of governments by these rudimentary accounts have not understood the problem.

The country also suffers from improvidence in the case of the Superior Electoral Court and the Supreme Court – under Bolsonaro, the country no longer has the Attorney General’s Office.

How many were prosecuted and tried for electoral crimes, slander, slander and political defamation, etc. since 2018, how much is this Sheet Did you notice the outpouring of messages from Bolsonaro’s campaign?

Hard to say the positive effect of people going to jail or paying crippling fines for promoting scum or funding the criminal organization. But it is an elementary activity of justice: discouraging crime.

The problem goes further, as experts on the subject argue.

It is not possible just to react to the avalanche of lies, as if we were living in times of analog communication, of giving “rights of reply” in the press, or, as now, of taking this or that “content” off the air.

Even if such decisions to remove the garbage were to have any effect, the physical structure of the courts and their agility would have to be much greater. They are not. The excess of information crimes makes the surveillance and punishment system inefficient, when it doesn’t put its feet in the hands.

In addition to processes, punishments and infrastructure, technological intelligence seems to be lacking. What about algorithms that cascade lies in a targeted way (“go viral”)? How to blame the “big techs” of the networks or call them to speeches in advance?

In summary, the account of the economic damage of the purchase of votes goes beyond the “take it, give it” accounting; it also depends on the damage to institutional structures, also depleted by the new public information system.