Brace for impact

Much has been said already about the 2025 budget, touted as the crookedest of all, but one glaring implication I’d like to stress is that it would set our country back, by at least a decade and possibly generations.

And we should brace for impact, not the sudden, forceful, instant-death kind of crash but an ugly, slow burn of sorts – a death by a thousand cuts.

Education

First of all, this year’s budget will severely and negatively impact our future, given the cuts in the education budget.

As we all know, Congress, during the bicameral conference, slashed the budgets of core education agencies while raising the budget for the Department of Public Works and Highways.

Core education agencies account for P965.26 billion – Department of Education (P782.17 billion), State Universities and Colleges (P127.23 billion), Commission on Higher Education (P34.88 billion) and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (P20.98 billion) (Philstar.com, Jan. 3, 2025).

However, to make it appear that the education sector still gets the biggest budget as mandated by the Constitution, the government added other agencies to the education sector, such as the Local Government Academy (P529.24 million), the Philippine National Police Academy (P1.37 billion), the Philippine Public Safety College (P994.3 million), the National Defense College of the Philippines (P334.64 million), the Philippine Military Academy (P1.76 billion), etc.

This is a good cop-bad cop move. Congress is the bad cop, while the government pretends to be the good cop. At the end of the day, however, Filipinos are still at the losing end.

As many have pointed out, the Marcos administration is taking us for fools.

Article XIV, Section 5 of the Constitution requires the highest budgetary priority for education, but clearly, this is not what’s happening and this will impact on our children’s future.

As it is now, the Filipino youth lag behind their peers in the region. We are poor in reading, math, science and spelling. Our teachers need more support for research and continuing education.

Our state universities are raising funds through all sorts of means, including the commercialization of properties that should otherwise be used for education. This is sure to continue.

We are throwing away the future of our children and that of our children’s children, and so on. As it is, we don’t even have enough funds for classrooms, computers or research, and yet we slash it even more.

But our lawmakers and policymakers don’t have this problem because most of them send heir children to world-class educational institutions abroad.

It is the ordinary Filipinos who will suffer the consequences of this corrupted budget.

Infrastructure

The budget for infrastructure, as we know, will go to the favorite rackets of lawmakers in cahoots with contractors – flood control projects, cat’s eyes, rock netting, etc. – yet come the rains, there will still be heavy flooding for sure.

The more important infrastructure, including roads to help solve traffic and improve mobility in the Philippines, will be relegated to the private sector, which will come at a cost for users.

Ayuda anomaly

And then there are the dole-outs in the form of the Ayuda sa Kapos Ang Kita Program (AKAP) which, at P26 billion, will no doubt be inflationary.

What’s also not being said is that the ayuda amount of P5,000 per family will hardly make a lasting impact on the near poor.

Our lawmakers said that AKAP would help the near-poor cope with rising prices of food, etc. – a problem that should have been addressed at its root cause, such as supporting local food producers and farmers, improving food supply bottlenecks, abolishing the cartels in agriculture, etc.

Instead, the easy solution is just to import shortfalls in food supply and dole out cash.

At best, some of these AKAP beneficiary families will have a few days of decent meals, while others will spend it to pay off debts. Worse, some may use it to gamble in the hope of making more money.

It is a band-aid solution and not an investment in our future. The conditional cash transfer – whose funding was also slashed in the 2025 budget – at least required families to send their children to school, get medical check-ups and the required vaccinations.

The 4Ps program was an investment in health and education. And yet, the Marcos administration decided to slash its budget in favor of AKAP.

AKAP is prone to corruption. This is just like the COVID-19-era ayudas, which were pocketed by local executives, as flagged by the Commission on Audit.

Against all this, we should brace for impact. Our country will continue to deteriorate in terms of quality of education and health – or, in short, human capital. I haven’t even discussed arts, culture and the humanities.

This year alone, ordinary Filipinos will have a challenging time, given the inflation-inducing budget.

Analysts expect December 2024 inflation to have picked up because of the still-rising prices of food, electricity and fuel – 2.6 percent in December, up from 2.5 percent in November.

Did you know that water rates also increased effective this month – P5.95 per cubic meter for Manila Water and P7.32 per cubic meter for Maynilad?

Love the Philippines

As I said, we should brace for impact. Years from now, historians will have a record of what our 2025 budget did to us. Its impact will linger for generations and generations to come.

Love the Philippines, our tourism slogan says. And yet, our leaders and lawmakers themselves can’t even do that.

Stealing funds meant for our country’s future isn’t love at all. It’s treason.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.