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Where are the local inventors when we need them most?
Where are the gadgets—those supposedly magical and wondrous
converters—that they claim can help engines run on water? The sad
truth is we want these inventors to pop out of the blue and brighten
our bleak lives by producing their supposed miracle gadgets on a
massive scale.
Right now, only these gadgets are
our painless way out of soaring oil prices.
Otherwise, the makers of policy
have to go back to the E-VAT on oil products (estimated to total
more than P45 billion this year) and decide on which of two painful
choices available will better ease the general suffering from
soaring oil prices.
First, suspend the E-VAT
collection to immediately lower the pump prices of gasoline and
diesel. Second, continue collection of the E-VAT but with a noble
caveat: a big portion of it will be used to subsidize food
production programs and cheap fuel for public utilities—jeepneys
and buses—and cargo trucks ferrying food supplies.
Either option has a grave fiscal
downside. Revenue effort is expected to fall short of public
expenditures and the fiscal agencies are struggling to collect more
taxes. Either option means losing revenue, with the first option as
the bigger fiscal disaster.
Suspending the E-VAT collection
will be a popular decision. The least concern of the public is
fiscal stability or easing budgetary deficits. The E-VAT suspension
will reap immediate political dividends for Mrs. Arroyo. A five
percent rise in her approval ratings is expected to follow the
suspension.
But the trade-off will be big—a
P45-billion revenue loss a year.
The government is leaning toward
the second option—which is to pool the E-VAT on oil and use a
chunk of it to help fund food protection and subsidize the diesel
used by public utility vehicles. The general idea is for the
government to lower the pump price of diesel used by public
utilities and carriers of food products by P2 or P3 per liter. The
car and SUV owners can take care of themselves.
The second option will create a
bureaucratic problem. What agency will oversee the use of the money
for production and diesel subsidies? Based on the initial statements
of Finance Secretary Margarito Teves, it is clear he wants his
Finance department to be fully in charge of the social amelioration
work funded by the E-VAT on oil.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap,
who is closer to the president than Teves, can pull enough strings
to make his department in charge of the oil E-VAT money that will go
to food-production subsidies.
The transportation secretary,
Leandro Mendoza, also has enough clout to demand that his department
be put in charge of the oil E-VAT money that will provide diesel
subsidies to public utility jeeps, public utility buses and freight
trucks moving food items. After all, it is the Land Transportation
and Franchising Regulatory Board, an agency under his department,
that has an accurate count of franchised public utility and cargo
haulers.
So what will it be?
Other than the expected turf war
over which will man the subsidies, other major problems may arise.
What farming sectors will get
production support? Will it just be the rice farmers, or will the
support be extended across-the-board, across all sub-sectors of the
agriculture sector? Will the multinationals that produce bananas and
pineapples for the global market be covered by the subsidies?
On the planned diesel subsidy,
drivers and operators or tricycles may ask for subsidy, too,
although they do not use diesel. Truckers hauling gravel and sand
and other non-food commodities may also clamor for diesel subsidy.
The noblest of government
intentions often get entangled in one problem after another. The
subsidy proposal will not be any different.
The sectors to benefit from the
subsidies will surely want to get their voices heard. The ideas that
they will propound may or may not be adopted. But the government has
to listen to them because they know the ins and outs of their
sectors better than most government bureaucrats.
The sense of the peasantry is
that Teves should not be the overseer of the subsidy fund. He is
known for his anti-farming bias. His stewardship of the Land Bank of
the Philippines, a bank established to support farmers and agrarian
reform beneficiaries, dramatized his visceral bias against the
peasantry.
Organized peasant groups say it
is “anybody but Teves.”
mvrong@yahoo.com
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