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The
budget plan to reduce the deficit by 50 percent, from
P125 billion last year to P63 billion in 2007, will
certainly be a tough act to follow considering the
propensity of the government to overspend.
The
President, nonetheless, is confident the Philippines
will survive the 50-percent budgetary deficit. “Every
item in the budget is designed to push good governance
to the limit, strengthen confidence and enterprise,
drive up investments and jobs, deliver social dividends
and fight terror and crime.”
However, every item proposed by Congress has a
corresponding cost, social and political, such as the
dirty pork barrel sanitized to mean nothing but a
congressional allocation.
Then,
there is the line department that eats up a good portion
of the budget, such as gasoline allowance,
transportation allowance, car repair, per diem for
meetings and out-of-town expenses, overtime pay, and so
forth and so on.
There
are also the fiscal reforms that, instead of reforming
the fiscals, make the Philippines an easy qualifier for
the who’s who in the world of graft and corruption,
neatly called good governance.
Last
year, President Arroyo in her most recent State of the
Nation Address announced the Philippines had earned P1
billion from the US Million Challenge Account and a
counterpart funding from the government’s fiscal
savings.
The
proceeds were to employ more investigators and
prosecutors (they used to be called fiscals but the term
was scrapped in favor of the most polite term of
prosecutors), buy or procure (without its negative
connotation) new technology to fight corruption.
All
this is meant to save so that the government could have
a more balanced budget and eradicate the corruptors and
the corrupt.
The
biggest allocation will go to the Department of
Education, and the Department of Public Works and
Highways. I was almost tempted to say Department of
Mal-education and Department of no Work and Highway
Robbery until I realized you cannot say that anymore of
the DepEd under Education Secretary Jing Lapus.
You
really can’t blame me and those who shared the same
sentiment; the DepEd and the DPWH were two of the most
corrupt agencies in the government in terms of public
perception sometime ago.
Of
the ratified budget bill of P1.13 trillion, P10 billion
is for assistance and rehabilitation of provinces hit by
the typhoons last year. Of that amount, P8 billion is to
be coursed through the departments of agriculture,
agrarian reform, energy, and public works and highways.
The rest will go to the DepEd.
The
easiest way to solve or ease the budget deficit is
usually to impose more taxes on people already paying
taxes and not those who evade and avoid taxes. That is
the reason why we have the comprehensive tax reform
program (CTRP) that makes the consumption of cigarettes
and liquors prohibitive and the value-added tax.
The
two measures are also the quickest way for the corrupt
government official to go into a spending spree as if
there’s no future generation who will suffer from their
sins.
These
words are not exactly mine but those of another
president. He said that, above anything else, the
government must balance its budget and “we can do that
without raising taxes.”
Said
President George W. Bush in his State of the Union
Address late last month, “What we need to do is to
impose spending discipline in Washington D.C.”
In
his speech, Bush boasted that the federal government did
that three years in advance. “We set a goal of cutting
the deficit in half by 2009 and met the goal three years
ahead of schedule.”
Bush
further declared: “Together, we can restrain the
spending appetite of the federal government and we can
balance the budget.”
E-mail: raulbvalino@yahoo.com.ph. |
