Smallness

The 2025 national budget is an unmitigated calamity. But that is not the biggest tragedy for the nation.

This mangled, corrupted and craven budget document is a symptom of a deeper disease: a country ruled by an irresponsible political class whose boundless greed is matched only by smallness of vision for the country.

How can this nation navigate through a volatile and uncertain world when it is betrayed at every turn by a political elite that is always keen to plunder but constantly unready to sacrifice for the larger good?

The thought occurred to me as I watched a documentary shared by Gary Teves. It was about Beijing’s decision to cancel $164 billion worth of US agricultural exports to the country. The cancellation was announced without much fanfare. It pulls the rug from under Donald Trump’s bluster about imposing punitive tariffs on China’s exports to the US.

The cancellation will certainly bring chaos to America’s agricultural heartland, Trump’s political base. Over the years, American farms have been geared towards supplying China’s huge food market. The cancellation will gut the heartland, force hundreds of farms into bankruptcy.

Trump is famously long on words and short on strategy. In his first term as president, he initiated a trade war with China using tariffs as a weapon to extract concessions. But he did not prepare his own economy for a trade war.

By contrast, Beijing responded to the Trump tariffs by planning ahead. China revolutionized its own agriculture using artificial intelligence in farms, editing genes and evolving climate resilient crops.

Seeing dependence on American agriculture as a vulnerability, Beijing planned ahead. China supported with investments the development of huge farms in Argentina and Brazil to produce soybeans. With infrastructure support and corporate investments, Beijing encouraged the growth of agricultural estates in several African countries to supply the Chinese market.

Having diversified the sources of its food imports, China was ready for Trump 2.0. When the incoming president babbled about imposing more tariffs on Chinese goods, Beijing was ready. They had moved manufacturing to Mexico to continue selling to the US market. Their investments in Argentina and Brazil yielded reliable supplies of soybeans and other crops.

The cancellation of American crop exports to China did not happen whimsically. Beijing had planned meticulously and pulled the plug when it was ready. This was strategic governance at its best.

With its people’s best interest at heart, Beijing planned strategically and executed brilliantly. When Trump resurrected his trade war bluster, China was ready for it. The emerging economic superpower is positioned to redefine global trade to suit its interest. Trump has lost the trade war even before he reassumes the presidency, the same way he lost the budget battle last month when he threatened to defund his own government.

China’s ruling elite thinks big and executes on a long horizon. This is how it protects its national interests and secures the future of its people.

The same cannot be said of the Filipino political elite. It has been a hindrance to national progress. It plunders at first opportunity and deploys nationalist jargon to legitimize misrule. It is a corrupt political elite that looks after its narrow interests first and the people’s welfare last. It is a curse on our nation.

The 2025 national budget is testament to the political elite’s betrayal of the nation.

Funding for education, the only means to improve the nation’s human capital, has been gutted. Instead of aspiring for a world-class education system, the political elite chose to play accounting games by disguising the real score to conform to the constitutional requirement regarding prioritizing education spending. The computerization program for our public schools was defunded.

Even as the existing law earmarks tariffs on agriculture imports to a fund for modernizing our farms, the undertaking was moved to unprogrammed appropriations. This makes it impossible for our best technocrats to adequately plan projects to improve our farm yields.

Instead of prioritizing counterpart funding for strategic projects supported by international development assistance, the budget diverts the money to inflate spending for public works controlled by the legislative districts. Taxpayer money will be used for projects with little strategic impact but vulnerable to kickbacks.

The conditional cash transfer program was controversial to begin with. The 2025 budget reduces it and transfers funds to an even more controversial unconditional cash transfer program that will have no long-term impact on bringing down poverty levels. This is nothing more than a thinly disguised program for wholesale vote-buying.

Instead of delivering health services to the grassroots, the 2025 budget removes subsidies for the health insurance program. This is justified on the silly argument that the health insurance system has more than enough money for the current low level of beneficiaries.

While educational institutions and military modernization funding was slashed, the inexplicable but huge increments to the budgets of both chambers of Congress were increased. The President’s line-item veto strangely took out items identified in the National Expenditure Plan prepared by the Executive branch while retaining all the tens of billions of congressional insertions.

After inflicting this corrupt budget on the nation, Congress goes on its merry way wasting expensive legislative time for clown shows such as the impeachment of the Vice President for the pettiest offenses. The person who is a heartbeat from the presidency was also purged from the National Security Council for irrelevance.

Good grief.