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It has become clear that government is amassing windfall E-VAT
revenue collections from the astronomical increases in gas, diesel
and oil prices. It is from this windfall collections that the Arroyo
administration is able to finance its subsidy programs and dole-outs
for the poor—who now make up at least 40 percent and maybe up to
60 percent of our population.
We reiterate our call to policy makers to reject
dole-outs to the poor as the way to help them solve their hunger and
poverty problems.
And we agree with the points made in the joint
statement titled “On Presidential Dole-Outs” released on June
25, by the Action for Economic Reforms, the Coalition Against
Corruption, the Makati Business Club, the Management Association of
the Philippines and the Transparency and Accountability Network.
We agree with the statement’s opening words
lauding the President’s “intention to assist the poor especially
during this difficult period” through the announced expenditure of
P2 billion to award grants to poor families in addition to other
subsidy programs.
We endorse the statement’s concern that the
Palace circumvented “constitutional processes in coming out with
these programs.” For these programs of expenditures were “not
authorized by Congress in the recently passed 2008 budget. The
President thus violated a constitutional provision that no money
will be paid out by the Treasury unless authorized by the General
Appropriations Law.”
We call on the President and her key Cabinet men
to please stop disregarding the Constitution. They have a massive
majority in the House and enough votes in the Senate. They must ask
their congressional allies swiftly to remedy the unconstitutionality
of the emergency spending programs launched these last many weeks.
Long-run harm of dole-outs
The statement says something we have many times
said in this column: “Dole-outs that address short-term political
exigencies at the cost of diverting public funds from substantive
anti-poverty programs” are wrong and cause harm to the poor and
the whole society in the long run.
“While it is government’s role to protect
the disadvantaged in our society, it is common economic knowledge
that ill-conceived subsidies are not efficient means of allocating a
developing country’s meager resources. In Latin America,
conditional cash transfers have had salutary effects in addressing
the health and education needs of the poor. But dole-outs without
counterpart performance by the beneficiaries are actually anti-poor.
Unconditional dole-outs make the government look good but do nothing
to tackle the roots of people’s poverty and daily hardship. They
do not solve the problem of insufficient harvests, high transport
fares and utility bills.”
Of course, many of the poor would rather not be
made to earn the cash and subsidies (which they are made to
understand come to them out of the goodness of the President’s
heart). Pandering to this flaw in human nature reinforces the bad
habit of getting things for nothing—which sadly appears to have
become prevalent among more and more Filipinos.
Work and leaders’ duty to uplift
Leaders—and that is what people who hold
public office and run governments should be—have a duty to God and
the nation to uplift not only the economic well-being of the people
but also their level of human development. And here we have to talk
of virtues. Leaders who promote mendicancy and the unjust habit of
getting things for nothing are guilty of dereliction of duty and
injustice.
The opposite of the bad habits of mendicancy and
getting things for nothing is the good habits of industriousness and
paying for everything one receives. Getting things for nothing is an
act of injustice that deforms the doer as much as the community.
President Gloria M. Arroyo’s father, the late
President Diosdado Macapagal, was keenly aware of the need to
inculcate the virtues of justice and industriousness to the Filipino
poor of his time—while at the same time lifting them out of
poverty. Instead of demeaning them with dole-outs, he organized the
Emergency Employment Administration (EEA). It addressed the problem
of poverty and revitalized the economy by creating hundreds of
thousands of jobs. It also got voters to support President
Macapagal’s Liberal Party in the mid-term election. The late
Filipino president’s pattern was US President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Launched in 1933, the New Deal
boosted economic recovery in America that was nearly devastated by
the Great Depression of 1929 to 1934. Without the New Deal, the
depression might not have ended in 1934.
The EEA was the first nationwide public works
project in our history. Thousands of jobless men and women earned
honest pay digging ditches, repairing roads and small streets—and
building new roads and bridges needed by the locality. They received
wages with which they were able to pay for their food and shelter.
Above all, they emerged from their labors with dignity. For work
always ennobles human beings, while dole-outs make them lose
self-respect.
The President and her economic team must
redirect their multi-billion peso subsidy and dole-out programs to
help the poor. They must reorganize them into job creation programs.
Work—jobs not dole-outs—is the way not only
to give the millions who are poor a ladder out of their poverty.
Work also gives them back their dignity. With dignity the human
heart can become a larger vessel of hope.
A hopeful Filipino society can become a really
great nation.
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