Politicos and bureaucrats misspend trillions of pesos each year.
At the rate they’re going, they’ll bankrupt the government.
In 2024 they budgeted P5.768 trillion. Short of revenues by 42.65 percent, they borrowed P2.46 trillion.
This 2025 they budgeted P6.326 trillion. Again short by 40.23 percent, they’ll borrow P2.545 trillion.
Imagine a family spending P6,326 every week, but having to loan two-fifths of it, or P2,545. It would soon keel over.
By yearend, total public debt, including past admins, will be P17.353 trillion. It will overshoot P20 trillion by the time President Bongbong Marcos steps down in 2028.
How will poor, hungry, undereducated Filipinos repay that?
Politicos and bureaucrats steal at least 20 percent of yearly budgets, the IMF and World Bank long reported.
In 2024 they looted P1.153 trillion – from public works and political ayuda, among others. They engaged in “7-7-7” and “30-30-30” rackets from June to December.
This 2025 they’ll plunder P1.265 trillion.
With their loot they buy nonessentials – signature bags, jewelry, machine pistols, luxury cars, mansions – all with no strategic development effect.
They only burden the economy. No care for the people.
Last Christmastime two in three families rated themselves poor, and one in four starved. Those are SWS’s worst poverty and hunger stats since 2003 and 2020, respectively.
Seventy-six million Filipinos tightened their belts. Food, water, medicines, schooling, electricity, gas, clothing, groceries, rent and repairs costs shot up.
Rice sold at more than P60 a kilo – three times BBM’s campaign lie of P20. The poor had to eat less.
Congressmen, senators and Cabinet members blamed it all on typhoons. Yet they’re the real culprits.
Every year they steal hundreds of billions of pesos in flood funds. In his July 2024 State of the Nation, BBM bragged about 5,500 completed flood works. All ghost, it turned out.
Two days of heavy rain ensued. Floods deepened and widened. People lost homes, shops, farms, businesses, belongings, livelihoods. Work, commerce, tourism halted. Evacuation facilities and relief goods were inadequate.
People’s misery multiplied.
Plunderers didn’t stop. They took P60 billion of an intended P90 billion from PhilHealth. Plus, P717 billion from Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. All to put into overpriced highway rock nettings, cat’s eyes and roller safety barriers.
The previous year they already pillaged P50 billion from Landbank, P25 billion from DBP and P50 billion from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
BSP had to sell 25 tons of gold, and its governor left. DBP suddenly had no more money for rural business loans, and its chairman also left. Landbank became undercapitalized; salaries and deposits of government employees, public school teachers, health workers, soldiers, policemen and retirees’ pensions are in peril.
They even played with rice. Last June, BBM slashed import tariffs from 35 to only 15 percent. By yearend 2024, Customs collections dropped P14.5 billion.
By law, that money could’ve gone to productivity aid to 2.4 million rice farmers. It’s what consumers could’ve saved in buying the staple.
Instead, a rice cartel profiteered P14.5 billion. A high Customs official colluded with a handful of importers-wholesalers to control three-fourths of the trade. They have a Very Influential Protector in Malacañang.
Now they’re making a show of solving the rice price crisis. The Department of Agriculture imposed a price cap of P58 per kilo of imported stock. DA forcibly will lessen it to P50 in February and P40 in March.
Market vendors will bear the brunt of price control, since importers-wholesalers sell high to them. Officials warn them about the new law that prescribes life imprisonment on overpricers.
For good measure, Sec. Francis Tiu Laurel ordered the National Food Authority to sell its emergency buffer stocks at only P40 per kilo.
At that rate NFA will lose P7 per kilo, or P2.331 billion, from its fire sale of 333,000 tons.
Now NFA must buy domestic palay to replenish its stock – 15 days’ worth, no longer just nine, under a new law. It needs P18 billion for that. But its budget for 2025 is only P9 billion.
But politicos and bureaucrats don’t worry about that. They’ve allocated to themselves political ayuda: P26-billion AKAP, P15-billion TUPAD, P45-billion AICS – all for vote buying in May.
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