The strange budgetary normalcy of an undisciplined country.

It is unfair to say that the country does not make structural reforms. It doesn't make all the ones it should, that's true, but there is one that has been done in the last 15 years: the broad consensus established on the need to foresee and achieve balance in public accounts or slight budget surpluses.

This starting point has become normalized in budget discussions. We can and should discuss where to direct spending and what taxes to levy, but without altering the final balance, which should be positive.

This was a path that began in 2011, with the harsh implementation of the conditions imposed by the financial bailout, and has already spanned several governments and political situations.

I concede that the way we arrived at equilibrium represents, in the end, only half a structural reform. Why? Because the adjustment did not touch current public spending, which has been increasing structurally year after year, and was done exclusively with the easiest variables: more taxes and indiscriminate cuts in investment.

Nevertheless, establishing the "zero deficit" objective is a very significant cultural shift. It's a principle because, as we know, our previous way of life involved increasing spending, raising taxes, and creating large deficits that accumulated into debt. Until this became unsustainable, and the rest is history.

The difference between before and after the balanced budget consensus – which, ironically, was achieved during a government supported by the far left – is striking. Before, the debate was about which taxes should be increased; now the debate is about which taxes should be cut. Before, there were attempts to mask the deficit to escape Brussels sanctions; now we are among the eurozone countries with the most balanced accounts. Before, maximum debt limits were tested with the old idea that "debt is managed, not paid"; today we know that's not how things work, and finance ministers like to show off increasingly lower debt ratios.

We have reached the point where a government can be penalized in its popularity and electoral performance if it starts running deficits without a good reason – a pandemic, for example? We don't know, but it's a hope we should nurture.

And we must nurture this because the next step will inevitably involve reforming public spending. Without the deficit as an adjustment variable, and with the heavy tax burden we already have, future adjustments will have to involve rationalizing public spending. This doesn't require nominal cuts in spending levels. It's enough that, year after year, public spending increases at a rate lower than nominal GDP growth.

That's what happened with the debt. The amount increases year after year, but its weight in a growing economy is getting smaller and smaller.

This normality of the budget balance is now joined by the normality of the budgetary process. The State Budget is not, and cannot be, an annual vote of confidence to which minority governments submit. The Budget must be, first and foremost, a financial reflection of the State's commitments and the laws in force. The remaining margin, which is relatively small, must then reflect the political choices that each government makes on a case-by-case basis.

In recent years, we have become accustomed to viewing the Budget as the only legislative event of the year, where all sectoral policies and hundreds of isolated measures, which had little or nothing to do with the budget, were piled up.

A year ago, political parties made around 2,000 amendment proposals during the specialized budget debate. Some examples include: annual assessment of the health status of security force professionals, halting the privatization of TAP (the Portuguese airline), promoting the work of Arraiolos carpet weavers and Estremoz figurine artisans, modernizing payment methods for sick leave audit requests, reviewing the career path of tax inspectors, and so on.

The result of this practice is extremely poor legislative quality – the members of parliament, in their long marathon sessions, paid little attention to what they were voting on – and a lack of independent discussion of each of those proposals.

José Luís Carneiro was right to make it a condition of the government's decision to exclude from the budget relevant matters such as the revision of labor laws, changes to social security, or alterations to the structure of the National Health Service. These are all matters of great importance, which only benefit from being discussed and decided separately from the budget.

And Joaquim Miranda Sarmento was right to prepare and present a budget that, after all, is just that: a budget. We were so addicted to the previous bad practice that now we're even surprised to see everything in its proper place.