Municipal burden, federal bonus: the crisis of public finances, culture and welfare law in Porto Alegre / RS

Abstract

Social Assistance is a right, even if it still maintains a constant conflict with a conservative culture, which sees it as a patronizing and assistentialist instrument of State duty. Therefore, Social Assistance became a right of Brazilian society, starting with the Federal Constitution of 1988. It is structured by the Single System of Social Assistance, which has a management with social participation and a National Social Assistance Fund, which in a transversal way carries out the implementation and execution of these policies between the Union, the States and the Municipalities. The Brazilian capitals are the municipalities that receive insufficient values from the Union for the execution of Social Assistance. In the case of Porto Alegre, capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, 94.91% of these policies are financed with free resources from the Municipal Treasury. Currently, Porto Alegre is experiencing successive deficits in the Municipal Treasury, which causes difficulties in the financing of public goods and services, especially Social Assistance, which has a growing behavior both in the service of beneficiaries and in the resources spent for its financing. The objective of this article was to observe the relation of Social Assistance financing to the municipal public finance crisis in Porto Alegre, where sufficient evidence emerged to observe that Social Assistance is a right to Brazilian society, through a bonus for Union and a burden for the Municipalities, in view of the budgetary restraint of the latter’s public finances, especially in Porto Alegre. This will require improvement in the quality and efficiency of the limited free resources of the Municipal Treasury.