Accounting ingenuity threatens Dilma's credibility, says Folha.

247 – National politics are out of sync. According to Folha, the accounting tricks used to mask public spending clash with President Dilma's attempt to regain the trust of business leaders. Read the editorial:

The jugglers

While President Dilma Rousseff organizes meetings with national business leaders in order to regain confidence in economic policy, advisors at the Presidential Palace are working in the opposite direction.

The official maneuvers and manipulations, which have spread distrust among economic agents, once again threaten the so-called primary surplus.

In 2012, this public savings account—which calculates all revenue and expenditure except interest expenses—was only balanced through manipulation. Fictitious revenues were declared, thus frustrating the mechanism's original objective, which is to curb the escalation of government debt.

There is now talk of freeing states and municipalities from the obligation, until now shared with the federal government, of spending less than they collect in revenue.

If the state and municipal savings targets are not met, current rules mandate that the federal government supplement the savings in order to reach the overall result – which last year was set at 3,1% of GDP.

The idea being developed in Brasilia is to eliminate the obligation to reimburse funds. Without this compensation, the measure will effectively reduce the country's overall surplus – states and municipalities have been responsible for 30% of the savings target.

Once again, the choice of a convoluted method to conceal failures is regrettable. If the Dilma government considers the primary surplus target excessive, it should express this transparently.

The best course of action, however, would be to abandon subterfuge and strictly adhere to the minimum savings target of 3,1% of GDP. The danger of a surge in public debt, which compelled the adoption of a primary surplus from the late 1990s onwards, has now been averted.

But what justifies the need today to maintain—and even increase—the brakes on government spending and revenue is something even more important. It can be said, without risk of exaggeration, that the continued development of Brazilian economic growth depends on government spending increasing more slowly than GDP.

This is the only way to relieve the private sector of an oceanic volume of taxes, which inhibits investment and faster economic growth—and helps to make Brazil expensive and uncompetitive on the global stage.

The surge of accounting ingenuity in the Rousseff administration won't make capital sprout from top hats. But it is causing confidence in economic policy, the immaterial but powerful fuel of growth, to disappear.