Budgetary-financial erosion of social rights in the constitution of 1988

Abstract

Throughout the three decades of the Federal Constitution, normative and fiscal redesigns were introduced by the Union in the guarantees of solidary federative organization and of social rights costing, under the pretext of safeguarding the intertemporal sustainability of the Brazilian public debt. In order to equalize the tension between economic stability and the effectiveness of social rights and their repercussion for the indebtedness process, the health and education minimum spending and the social security budget were gradually mitigated, which operated both in the symbolic field and in the pragmatic, as a kind of fiscal balance to the need for allegedly unlimited cost for monetary and cambial policies. Unlink taxes, reduce the scope of minimum spending regimes and restrict the interpretative scope of intergovernmental equalization transfers of federative distortions has become a strategy, assumed – directly or indirectly – by the Union since the early 1990s, of macroeconomic stabilization policy, above all, monetary. Thus, a long and still ongoing process of budgetary and financial deconstruction of social rights has been undertaken, which restricts the structural identity of the FC/1988, under the pretext of increasingly demanding fiscal consolidation of the reduction of the size of the state.