OUR BACHELOR PRESIDENT!

“As a bachelor, PNoy keeps his merrymaking ways.

He wakes up later than most jobholders and wage earners do.

He designs his own agenda according to his needs for the day.

He buys gadgets and toys as he wishes, as long as he has the money to pay for them.

He is a bachelor, remember?”

BY TONY LOPEZ

When the nation elected a bachelor and an economist president in May last year, it was thought that would be good for the country.

A bachelor president would not have a first lady whose frivolities and Imeldific tastes could detract from the more urgent problem of rebuilding a nation ravaged by poverty and the worst global economic slowdown in 80 years.
An economist president would have an intimate and sympathetic understanding of the country’s basic problem—the gnawing poverty which afflicts from a quarter to half of 95 million Filipinos.

The record of President Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino 3rd so far is disappointing.

As an economist, PNoy has approved and or tolerated increases in prices and rates of nearly every basic good and service—of rice (the bellwether of all other consumer prices), mass transit like MRT and LRT, tollways and expressways, taxis and buses, and petroleum products. The increases are not simple price adjustments. They are dramatic, massive, astronomical, revolting, sudden
and immediate.

An economist looks at the cost of producing a product or a service and allows a certain margin—called profit for its producer.
As a bachelor, PNoy keeps his merrymaking ways. He wakes up later than most jobholders and wage earners do. He designs his own agenda according to his needs for the day. He buys gadgets and toys as he wishes, as long as he has the money to pay for them. He is a bachelor, remember?

On November 27, 2010, the 77th birth anniversary of his father, the martyred opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., SWS began a four-day survey of hunger among Filipinos. The results are disturbing.

Eighteen of every 100 Filipinos claim to have been hungry in the last three months (the second to the fourth months of the
Aquino presidency), up from 16 of 100 in September and from the average of 13.7 out of every 100 in the past 12 years. SWS also found that 9.2 million families—49 percent of respondents—consider themselves poor.

A fifth of Filipinos (3.4 million families or 19 million people) are hungry. They don’t have anything to eat. Half of them (9.2 million families or almost 50 million Filipinos) are poor. They don’t have money or assets.

What does Noynoy, the bachelor, do? Well, he buys a slightly used (10,000 kilometers or the average mileage one logs driving a car in a year) Porsche for P4.5 million. He didn’t steal the money. It is his money. After all, he is part owner of the single biggest piece of contiguous sugar plantation land, which by the way has been losing money every year for the past 10 years.

In most of the basic products and services, the common producer should be the government whose responsibility it is to produce basic goods (like food) and render basic services like reliable public transport and roads. To finance these things, the government collects taxes. Taxes are applied according to one’s income—the higher your income, the higher your tax. The poorer you are, the more is your need for basic goods (like food) and basic services like public transport.

It is government’s responsibility to provide these things. So it collects taxes in places like Visayas and Mindanao and spends the money in places like Metro Manila and the rest of Luzon where the bulk of the population—and business—are.

It is fallacious reasoning to say that the people of Mindanao and the Visayas should not pay for higher rates of taxis, buses and tollways in Metro Manila because they don’t live in Metro Manila. If Metro Manila revolts because of the breakdown in or high prices of basic services, the resulting commotion and rebellion will spread to the south and burn the entire archipelago.

Poverty has its roots in massive unemployment and underemployment that bedevil a quarter of employable Filipinos and in the increasing income disparity between the few who are very rich (majority of whom do not pay the proper taxes) and the millions who are very poor.

Joblessness and poverty in turn feed a communist insurgency that is the longest running in the whole world and a Muslim separatist movement that is also the longest running Muslim separatist rebellion in the world. These twin insurgencies, in turn, prompt the state to allocate scarce financial resources to an armed forces that is consistently disrespectful and contemptuous of the commander in chief and exceedingly corrupt to the core, not to mention grossly incompetent, for having failed to defeat, after 40 years, its two major enemies.

The bottomline? We are a failed state, according to the Foreign Affairs Magazine. Globally, the Philippines is below average in economic freedom. In entire Asia, the country is also below average, No. 21 out of 41 countries.

Economic freedom is defined as the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume and invest in any way they please. That freedom is protected and not constrained by the state.

Without economic freedom, economists say, there is no true political freedom. Which is why sacada workers in a sugar hacienda often do not exercise their right to vote freely because their choice, if at all, is dictated by the plantation owner.