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The Senate approved this Wednesday, in the 1st round, the basic text of the Emergency PEC (Proposal for Constitutional Amendment), with measures to control public spending and authorizing the payment of up to R $ 44 billion through the new emergency aid . The text received 62 favorable votes and senators will continue to vote on the change proposals (highlights) before the matter moves to the second round of voting. If approved in two rounds, the PEC goes on to vote for the Chamber of Deputies.
The proposal was initially presented in 2019 by the government with the aim of creating spending containment mechanisms when the federal government, states or municipalities were in a fiscal emergency. It was considered a government priority after the pension reform was passed that year.
However, with the pandemic, the project fell into the background and only returned to the center of attention for the purpose of paying for emergency aid. The government made the approval of the PEC a condition for releasing a new round of benefits.
If the proposal is approved by the House without changes, it goes to the presidential sanction. If the deputies change the text, the bill returns for a new vote in the Senate.
What does the text say about the new emergency aid?
PEC authorizes the payment of a new emergency aid and a total expenditure of R $ 44 billion with the payment of the benefit. The number of fees and the amount of the benefit depend on the approval of a legislative proposal by the National Congress.
The government must send to Congress an MP (Provisional Measure) with the provision of four installments of the new aid, with a value of R $ 250.
The proposal approved by the senators also relaxes the fiscal rules so that the government has space in the Budget for payments, leaving these expenses outside the ceiling in the limit of R $ 44 billion.
Due to the spending ceiling approved under the direction of Michel Temer in 2016, public spending for each year should be limited to that of the previous year, corrected only for inflation. Therefore, to increase or generate some expense, the government needs to cut another of equivalent value.
What changes in public accounts?
As a counterpart stipulated by the government for the payment of emergency aid, the text maintains the so-called triggers, measures that are automatically triggered in times of crisis, when public accounts are tight and reach certain levels considered worrying.
Among these measures, there are barriers for the Union, states or municipalities to create mandatory expenses or tax benefits, carry out public tenders or make adjustments to public servants.
These triggers were already foreseen in the initial government text and are considered very important by Minister Paulo Guedes, who wants to contain the growth rate of public spending.
The initial version of the government also contemplated the possibility of temporarily reducing wages and working hours, but Guedes relented and that was removed from the text.
Controversies that were left out
The previous version of the text of the rapporteur Marcio Bittar (MDB-AC), released last week, suffered much criticism because it foresaw the end of the minimum amounts that the government must spend on health and education.
States are required to allocate 12% of their resources to health and 25% to education. The federal government must spend 15% of the budget on health and 18% on education.
The original version of the report also revoked the transfer of 28% of the income from the FAT (Workers Assistance Fund) to the BNDES (National Bank for Economic and Social Development), which is the bank’s main source of funds.
With the controversy over these points, the vote, which was initially scheduled for last week, has been postponed until today.
What do you need to pass?
In the Chamber, the PEC needs to be voted on again in two rounds, where it needs the vote of 308 of the 513 deputies in each of them.
To make this next step quick, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira (PP-AL) announced that the PEC will go directly to the Plenary of the Chamber.
