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In a special session on Sunday, the Assembly reached a whole new level of inaction by approving the 2006 budget without voting! They may have been trying to prove Heidegger’s famous statement “The Nothing itself nothings”. However, some observers agreed with Nietzsche: “They muddy the water that it may appear deep”.

In any case after only one hour of debate in the special Sunday session, the PUSC legislators asked for a 10 minute recess. After the recess, Representatives Ricardo Toledo and Rodolfo Delgado did not return in time, either because they were talking on the phone or “looking for documents”. The quorum was broken, so by default the budget was approved. The Assembly bylaws state that the budget must be approved in first debate on November 27^th and in the second debate on November 29^th.

Several reps expressed opinions on the automagic approval process. “The PUSC was betting on the lack of a quorum from the beginning”, according to Libertarian Federico Malavassi, “They didn’t want to discuss it, the session was getting complicated for them.” PUSC legislator Ricardo Toledo said, “Nobody from PLN came to the session. Someone must have called them and given them instructions not to come.”

So what was approved? The 2006 budget is 2,800,000,000,000 (2.8 trillion Colones), which would be 5,645,161,290 dollars (5.6 billion) at the current exchange rate of nearly 496 Colones for the dollar. The Assembly cut 37 billion Colones of repayment on the national debt from the proposed budget, and redirected it to fund road repairs.

The new budget then will have 1.5 trillion colones that will come from taxes. The other 1.3 trillion will be financed. Nearly 1 trillion of this amount is to pay off old debt.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Costa Rica News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.