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Albay Gov. Jose Salceda, the guy who became famous for saying President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) might be a bitch but she was one lucky bitch, had a very interesting proposition last week. More “cash transfers” to poor Filipinos, he said, are needed to spur the economy in times of soaring food and energy prices. “This money could be made productive if they are given to the poor. Investments for the poor make sense. Anything that goes to the poor is a correct policy.”
Two things are patently wrong with it.
The first most everyone has already pointed out. “It’s all for show,” Mar Roxas says, a sentiment echoed by the other senators, some of them pro-administration. It’s too little, too late. It’s just PR, or worse Propaganda 101, an attempt to make Gloria Macapagal Arroyo look good while making the Lopezes look bad. It’s an attempt to shift the blame for the mess this country is in, particularly when the mess gets messier in the coming months as the rice crisis and oil crisis bite, from the true source of it.
More than that, the subsidies mask the true depth and scale of the problem, which are mind-boggling. We are not dealing with a temporary downturn here, or a bust phase in the regular boom-bust cycle. The food and oil crises are here to stay. The era of oil, in particular, is dead. Alarming as the rise in prices of all basic goods is, it is only the beginning. The urban poor who, unlike their counterpart in the provinces, have no backyards to raise vegetables or pigs in, can hardly cope with this. It’s a recipe for runaway crime. People who are hungry will steal and kill.
The second point is just as patent, though seldom articulated. Salceda is right. Anything that goes to the poor is a correct policy. But if so, why wait for the poor to get to near-death before doing something for them?
For the truly astounding – and thoroughly reprehensible – thing is that government has been giving enormous subsidies all this time, whose sums make the combined subsidies for the poor today look like, well, the tips car-owners toss to watch-your-car boys. We’re talking about the “subsidies” to the rich, notably to its topmost officials, and still notably to the First Couple, in graft and corruption. Unlike the current subsidies for the poor, the subsidies to the rich, or crooked, are pure dole-out, and even insults the word “dole-out.” Unlike the current subsidies for the poor, the subsidies to the rich, or venal, is pure gratuity, and even insults the word “pillage.”
If we want to give subsidies to the poor, subsidies that can truly be put to productive use, let’s give them to our farmers. The farmers are the only ones who can bail us out of impending hunger. But whatever we do, enough of giving “subsidies” to corrupt heads of state, secretaries, congressmen, generals, bishops and judges. Anything that goes to them isn’t just bad policy; it’s bloody murder. — Conrado de Quiros, Inquirer
