‘Doing nothing is better than implementing policy-making parties’

‘Doing nothing is better than implementing the policies of the current forming parties.’ This is stated by public finance professor Bas Jacobs of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the BNR Big Five programme. He has difficulty with the economic policies that some of the forming parties have drawn up, or the lack thereof.

He is also strongly critical of the media, which in some cases only scrutinized the economic plans of the parties after the elections. For example, he saw many legal and constitutional barriers in the PVV party manifesto. ‘It was a lot of free beer, but the questions about how we were going to pay for it were not asked in advance, it was not taken seriously.’ As a ‘serious economist’, he finds it difficult to give a ‘serious answer’ to an election manifesto that is ‘not serious’. “At that moment we are normalizing something that is not serious.” He saw that problem not only with the PVV, but also with the BoerBurgerBeweging. ‘Why do we take parties seriously that do not advocate serious policies? This also applies to BBB, for example,’ says Jacobs.

The economist therefore finds it difficult to predict what the outcomes of this formation will be in the economic field. He also cites the unexpected outcomes of the previous cabinet formation. ‘Rutte IV produced an economic program that could not have been predicted in any way based on the election manifestos of the four participating parties. There, a spending increase was written into the books that was even higher than the SP had in its election manifesto.’ According to him, a lot went wrong there. ‘Many ineffective policies have been implemented, for example with billions going to climate and nitrogen. That could have been done with much less public money.’

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Long-term policy

At a macro level, Jacobs has a less positive expectation. ‘Political fragmentation and polarization mean that it is becoming increasingly difficult to implement economic reforms; to implement structural policy improvements and to tackle a number of painful issues.’ According to the professor, this also has an impact on the investments that are necessary in the long term. ‘It makes it more difficult to prioritize long-term investments over short-term consumption. The result of this is that political-economic policy is gradually getting worse.’

Jacobs is therefore also issuing a warning to citizens and companies. ‘They must prepare for structural problems – such as in the housing market, the labor market, education and the Tax Authorities – that are not being resolved.’ Some of the problems are already visible, the economist says. He sees this, among other things, in the ‘low productivity growth’ that the Netherlands is recording. ‘