Can we ever get a straight statement?

It seems quite clear to us that the country can never get a straight answer about anything related to the real state of our economy.

It seems that there is a grand game of smoke and mirrors being played here, and every time there is some kind of news about the economy that may threaten to belie the truth behind the Prime Minister’s purported economic miracles, the government steps in first and foremost in an effort to dominate and control the narrative.

The European Commission’s assessment of Budget 2020 is a fine case in point. The government, or rather the finance ministry was a step ahead of the game on Wednesday when it came out welcoming the fact that the Commission had found Malta’s budget to have been compliant with the Stability and Growth Pact, that we are expected to be among the seven euro-area Member States expected to be above their medium-term budgetary objectives in 2019, and above or at par in 2020.

And that was about the extent of it. It did not go into any details, which, we would bet, the ministry knew was going to be published the next day.

And guess what? The Commission’s full assessment was published, in fact, the next day and it was far from the rosy, completely innocuous picture that had been painted the day before by the one step ahead government.

The truth of the matter is that, yes, the budget was compliant but all the rest was glossed over because we cannot have any negativity to spoil the economic boom mantra, can we?

What the Commission did in its assessment was to have sounded a number of alarm bells, and the loudest amongst them was our reliance of selling passports through the Individual Investor Programme.

The truth of the matter is that the Commission found a heavy reliance on the hard to predict Individual Investor Programme and has recommended “careful” monitoring of expenditure developments for risks of falling foul of the Pact.

Recent measures to address pensioners, meanwhile, were found to not be contributing to the system’s long term sustainability.

Our fiscal surpluses, according to the Commission, are heavily driven by Individual Investment Programme revenue, the development of which is highly unpredictable.

Moreover, the Commission even pointed out how our net public expenditure annual growth corrected for one-offs is expected to be one of the highest in the euro area, risking our very compliance with the Pact which the government bragged about just the previous day.

The same goes for reports from credit rating agencies, where we are also usually only given the nice part of the picture, without the warts. Then we have a government that brags of having performed economic miracles, but at the same time its own central bank releases a study showing quite clearly that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer under its watch.

The problem is that we are not being given the whole picture. Nowadays what we have is a pretty picture drawn up by the finance ministry and vetted very carefully to ensure none of the risk downsides or assessments see the light of day.

And we have platitudes being dispensed by the Prime Minister and the finance minister about how great the men and women in the street are doing as a nation, but at the same time it is no big secret that the Average Joe is feeling the pinch in so many ways.

And the Average Joe deserves to know the whole picture, and to not be bamboozled into believing the riches the country is accruing will one day trickle down to them.

It is just unfair to lead people on like this, to give them a false sense of security, only for them to realise at point down the road that the hammer is to fall, and possibly very hard indeed, on their standards of living.

People deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but that is certainly not what they are getting from their government.