With growth slowing to a snail’s pace, President Lee Myung-bak’s administration is reportedly revising its earlier 2013 economic management plan, focusing on an increase in spending. In other words, it is considering taking on additional debt to finance growth.

Few policymakers in the administration no longer mention fiscal prudence as a virtue they have been pursuing. Is it the same administration that, until recently, vowed its top priority was balancing the budget in 2013 ― one year ahead of its original target year?

When it was submitting its 2012 budget plan late last year, the Lee administration promised an early recovery and envisioned growth hovering around 4.5 percent. But growth slowed from the year-on-year rate of 2.8 percent in the first quarter this year to 1.5 percent in the third quarter.

With the quarterly growth rates plummeting, the administration has had to revise its original forecast downward several times in the past. Now it acknowledges that this year’s growth will be slightly higher than 2 percent.

The administration misled the nation again when it submitted its 2013 budget request two months ago. It said the economy would grow 4 percent next year. But it did not take long before the administration’s major economic think tank, the Korea Development Institute, has slashed growth to 3 percent. Still worse, the government-funded Korea Institute of Finance claims that the rate is still too high, cutting it to 2.8 percent.

Slower growth meant smaller tax revenues than the originally planned 205.8 trillion won. The administration estimated the revenues at 203.3 trillion won in September and revised them to 202.6 trillion won two months later.

Next year will be little different, with the rate of growth already projected to fall well below the administration’s projection. No wonder there is already much talk about a supplementary budget among budget officers.

On top of this, the ruling Saenuri Party, which committed itself to 10 trillion won in additional spending during its presidential campaign, is in favor of a proposal to write an extra budget early next year. Nothing is more welcome to the budget officers, who apparently have felt bound by their earlier promise to balance the budget by 2013.

Against this backdrop, the Lee administration is scheduled to hold an emergency economic conference with the participation of senior policymakers next Thursday. It may presumably follow a well-scripted scenario of playing up the protracted economic crisis, lowering its growth projections and calling for a supplementary budget for an early recovery.

Such a policy change would be an about-face for the Lee administration, which has until recently emphasized fiscal prudence as an antidote to the kind of financial crises some debt-ridden European countries are now undergoing.

Still, the 10 trillion won in additional spending next year, so large as it may be, is dwarfed by the five-year spending programs President-elect Park Geun-hye committed herself to during her presidential campaign. She will need 94.37 trillion won for her big-ticket projects, including 28.33 trillion won in welfare and 23.51 trillion won in child care during the next five years. The amount does not include the money her party committed during the April general elections ― 27.61 trillion won in projects and 9.2 trillion won subsidies to local governments.

A more sensible approach would be for Park to prioritize her election promises, focus on key ones and scale down or renounce less important ones. Few voters in their right mind would expect her to make good on all her campaign promises.

At the same time, she may well dust off a tax proposal that had been shelved in the face of taxpayer opposition and seriously consider increasing value-added and other taxes if she intends her administration to live within its means.

During the presidential campaign, one of her key economic advisers proposed raising the ratio of tax revenue to national income, now at 19 percent, to 21 percent to finance welfare and other projects. But the party stopped pushing for it when it found it was not popular among voters.

But the proposed increase should not be too much of a burden, given that the ratio of tax revenue to national income had been at 21 percent until the Lee administration cut it by 2 percentage points. Moreover, the average ratio among OECD members is much higher ― 25 percent.