Sadly, it’s already pretty clear that there is not going to be any kind of across-the-board cooperation between political parties even when it comes to mending the economy. And while it’s natural for different parties, especially those so opposed to each other, to bitterly criticise each other’s policies, it’s still a bit rich of representatives of the former PTI administration to call out the new budget for “unrealistic assumptions”, etc, when their own last formal budget had to be literally rolled back, and a new mini-budget introduced, only because it was too ambitious and made too many fantastic assumptions. That particular exercise and how it suspended the IMF program, like so many times over the last three or so years, clearly hurt the economy and businesses more than it helped anybody, and now the situation requires everybody to work together, in the larger national interest, instead of trying to cut the other down for brownie points. Now the situation is very different. If our own internal bickering creates a crisis big enough to spook the IMF, and the bailout program is written off, then nobody would be the winner because the only remaining option would be to cut expenses and work out the least painful path to default. Because that is precisely what happens when a country with one of the smaller economies and largest debt burdens in the world is unable to borrow more to pay off old loans and interest on them. Our political parties ought to understand that even if they want to live and fight and demean each other another day, they will still have to work together right now to revive the economy. And that would require sacrifices on everybody’s part. Therefore, no matter how much they despise each other politically as well as personally, there’s no better idea right now than to go along with the government’s charter-of-economy initiative and pitch in all the smart ideas about assumptions and spin-doctoring over there. *