Bad economics

I don’t like it any more than the next guy, but I cannot in all fairness object to the increase in premiums of the Social Security System and Philippine Health Corp. For very selfish reasons I want the SSS to be around and viable when I become eligible for pension – which is soon – and to continue receiving my pension for whatever is the remainder of my natural life. This increase of 0.6 percent is supposed to extend the actuarial life of the SSS to 2043.

As to the doubling of the PhilHealth premium (I’ve been paying the higher rate for my kasambahay since last year), providing health care for what will soon be 100 million Filipinos is going to cost more than a pretty penny. And with their expanded Z Package program – you can now get a prosthesis courtesy of PhilHealth – someone’s got to foot the bill... and that’s us poor working slobs.

Both institutions collect fees and give out benefits, and the two columns in the ledger will have to balance out somehow. There just better not be any scams going on in SSS and PhilHealth where my hard-earned money is misused and abused – or I will lead the charge in stringing those guys up by their toes and feeding them to a swarm of red fire ants.

My electric bill, however, is a different matter. Perhaps I’ve used up my store of understanding and goodwill, but I am livid that I am paying 20 percent more for using 10 percent less electricity (comparing my October and December bills), and paying three percent more for using 15 percent less (November vs December). What kind of economics is that?

There are enough people fighting that onerous P4.15/kwh increase in generation charge, but I still want to know why I’m paying for electricity I don’t use – as in why I am paying for system losses that Meralco cannot seem to plug (that’s five percent of my bill each month, and how, pray tell, do they compute this? by ouija board?), why I am forced to be Santa Claus by shouldering subsidies, why I am answering for the universe under the dubious heading “universal charges” (my colleague Marcihu tells me that’s all the debt and interest payments lumped into one) – and, worst of all, why oh why am I even being taxed for all these? Complaints about these obscene charges have been aired again and again, but the general reaction seems to be dead-ma lang, as in bahala ka sa buhay mo.

With the battlecry of needing to raise revenues, one strategy the government seems to be taking is the path of least resistance – get the money not from where it should be collected (i.e. smugglers, tax evaders, corporations and individuals who can afford to hire creative accountants, people with hidden or even not-so-hidden wealth, crooked politicians and so on and so forth) but from where it is easiest to collect, and that is from peasants like you and me who have very little (if any) choice but pay taxes on electricity we don’t use and pay layer upon layer of EVAT on products we consume, and from taxes on our salaries withheld even before we get our hands on our hard-earned money.

I think I’ll need help gathering those red fire ants to sic on these people.