The Lithuanian Parliament is currently considering draft laws on national budgets for 2010 – the state budget, the budget of the State Social Insurance Fund (SODRA) and the budget of the Mandatory Healthcare Insurance Fund. The laws on national budgets for 1990-2010 differ only in figures, while the rest of the 2010 budget laws – the rules and procedures of budget formation, the funding principles and the priorities (absence of priorities to be more precise) – are equally the same as far back as in 1990. Billions of litas have been spent incredibly heedlessly. Every year we hear the same promise that the budget will be different already next year. And when the next year comes, things go just as they went last year. Isn’t it time to stop being weak-kneed? Let the bills of the 2010 budgets be referred back to the Government and the Ministry of Finance, and let the Ministry of Finance summon up all its capacities and trim budget expenditure by, at least, another 2.5 billion litas, down to the level of 2006. LFMI’s President Rūta Vainienė analyses this issue in a commentary published in daily Lietuvos Žinios.
