Tomás Regalado

Don Tomas and the shame of others

14 October, 2015 News, Democracy, Employment, Business, United States, International, Politics, Social Politics, Mayor, businessmen, meeting, Spain, Malaga, Tomás Regalado

This morning I had the good fortune to meet Don Tomas Regalado, his charming wife and his business management team led by Don Julián Linares. Don Tomás is the Mayor of the city of Miami, in his second term, and largely builds on the change that this city has undergone in recent years. Miami was one of the first cities in the US that came into crisis, did so incredibly hard, yet it was one of the first to get out of the crisis, restore business confidence, generate employment and grow at dizzying pace. And Don Tomas Regalado has provided us with a first-person account of how they have made Miami go from being ruined and evicted to being the second-largest city in the US, just behind Austin.

Accompanying Don Tomás in the room and on the part of the Malaga delegation were representatives of the city council of Malaga, the Junta de Andalucía, the School of Industrial Organization, the Chamber of Commerce, the Confederation of Businessmen, Ausbanc - Of the meeting - and a handful of businessmen representing the business fabric of Malaga among whom I had the great luck of being able to be. The idea - which was, of course, the most important - was on the one hand to listen to the story of Don Tomas, with his anticrisis measures that have given such a good result to the city of Miami, and on the other hand to seek ties of cooperation so that companies here may have Representation there and vice versa.

Don Tomás has made me feel ashamed of others. Shame on our political class. Shame because after all we are the ones who choose them. And I do not mean those of one party or those of the other, who seem to me the same with different color, but the kind of ruler that we aupamos to the power in general. And poor Don Tomas had no intention of ridiculing our political class. On the contrary, he has been tremendously generous praising the virtues of our municipal rulers. And I say generous because it must have assumed that they follow similar measures to theirs to get us out of the crisis and combat unemployment, poverty and childish deprivation among other things. And while Don Tomás told us about some of the things that his government team had done in recent years by the citizens of Miami, the politicians there, even though they themselves were not aware, were getting smaller and smaller, until they were so Insignificant on the table that gave shame to others.

Don Tomás arrived at the mayor's office, finding an indebted city council and with incipient poverty rates in his city. One of his first steps was to lower taxes. Taking this measure was aware that would increase the deficit in the short term but his sight was set in the medium and long term. So he thought that the best thing he could do was to remove tax burdens from his citizens so that they could get by much more easily. To fight against the deficit, Don Tomas began to reduce expenses. To do this, it reviewed all the contracts that had signed the council and encouraged all municipal employees to tighten their belts doubly: on the one hand, adjusting wages and demanding more productivity and on the other - do not miss it - eliminating or drastically reducing retirements And bonds of ex-politicians and former high-ranking officials who when he arrived at the mayor's office pre-retired in their fifties with annual salaries of 150,000 dollars. Sounds familiar? The fact is that by reducing spending managed to reduce the deficit (which today is a growing surplus) while helping their fellow citizens to exit before the crisis. Why? Because the sooner they left the crisis before, the entrepreneurship and the generation of wealth would return, as it has been.

In the second place, Don Tomas launched a plan for the use of non-monetary resources. In this way, he looked for plots, zones, buildings and other immobilized of the council that was not being used and it granted, almost at zero cost, to the private initiative so that it exploded as long as the city council did not cost him anything. Why? This would create privately funded initiatives that would generate employment. Employment would bring wealth and wealth prosperity of the area. In this way, for example, it turned slums into areas of high prosperity linked to art and culture in which art galleries were established, And there were many artists there and in their summer flourished restaurants, supermarkets, shops of all kinds and, in general, employment and wealth were generated. At the same time, it invested $ 200 million to create first-rate film studios that Viacom has already rented, generating more than 500 direct jobs and a large number of indirect ones. Again, more employment, prosperity and wealth, while confronting fire unions, police and public officials to improve care for the citizen without increasing wage costs. Thirdly Don Tomas faced the banks. He basically sued them in the courts, and he also won them. He sued them for abusing the law to avoid paying taxes and abusing the citizen with clauses of all kinds. In essence, it made them partly responsible for the situation created with their "mortgage bubble" as he called it himself and intended that they should not be rositas for it. In this way, it managed to increase the income of the city while still reducing the economic pressure on its citizens. In addition to this, Don Tomas launched many other measures, among which I would point out that a percentage of Property Tax, our IBI, is specifically intended for the fight against child poverty, exclusion and other measures aimed at children under The organization The Children Trust, a measure that was voted democratically by the citizens themselves. In other words, there citizens were able to vote to decide that a percentage of their own municipal taxes should be devoted entirely to the most disadvantaged children. In summary, to get Miami out of the crisis and turn it into the second most prosperous city in the United States, with incredible growth rates, Don Tomás lowered the taxes of citizens, pleaded against the banks and raised taxes on them, improved The public function reduced costs, professionalized the attention to the citizen, used the municipal resources to generate wealth without the weight of the investment fell on the municipal coffers, eliminated life annuities of pre-retired politicians, improved the attention to the entrepreneur and dedicated a significant sum of Money, with the approval of their fellow citizens, to improve the lives of thousands of children every year. What I do not understand is how, if these measures have given such a spectacular result, here they have not worked. Ah no, wait, here they have done just the opposite ... Shame I should have them sit at the same table because of course it has embarrassed me to see them there becoming tiny while Don Tomas spoke.