PORK BARREL POLITICS IN PHILIPPINE BUDGET

From the common Filipinos, our country’s budget is a technical maze, incomprehensible and irrelevant to his daily economic activities. Not knowing that the enormous amount in our annual budget will be taken, or unarguably stolen, from the pockets of every Filipino.

PNoy’s submission of his P1.7 Trillion 2012 budget for Congress’ approval means that our government, through legislation, will be taking a portion from our own earning to raise that enormous amount. Granting with a population of 90 Million, everyone including our one-year old children will be paying almost P19 thousand in order to run and operate his government next year.

If you are going to explain in this way to the Barrio folks, they will be agitated to rise up in arms to topple this usurious government.

Is it worth to pay such amount to a government branded as one of the most corrupt in the world, perpetrating poverty in all its policies, with oppressive instrumentalities and favors only the powerful few?

No one can escape from this imposition for this is an inherent and necessary power which we call taxation. Every citizen shall contribute from his own earnings, economic activities and properties owned in order to operate a government.

But before taxation, there is what we called, ideally, the social contract entered into between the governed and the governor. The government is organized and placed there by the people in order to govern with a primordial obligation that it shall preserve order within the country.

Hoping that this contract will not be forgotten that before we will contribute, we shall ask what happened to our previous payments and did it fulfill the government’s obligation to protect us and preserve order in the society we live in?

I know that this is too idealistic for a country used to promises.

What we can easily believe however is that the 2012 budget like its predecessors will only favored the oligarchs, the politically and the economically powerful few and it is prepared justifying the politics of patronage, favoritism and booty capitalism and this is commenced by the pork barrel politics.

This is not Pnoy’s fault for before him the system is already in place but it will be his entire fault if after his term he will not be fulfilling his heroic promise to curb corruption, and I suggest that he should start from the Philippine system of budgeting and must exercise his vast ‘power of the purse.’

Our budget is a pork barrel politics per se which promotes economic inefficiencies in the allocation of resources at the national and at every legislative district.  It has no economic advantages or contributions at all and it is rather regressing and leading our country towards economic slowdown and deficits.

From the start of preparing the budget, our earnings are divided like war booty in a form of congressional insertions, plutocracy in the legislations and in asserting legislative power over that of the President by threatening to delay the approval of the budget. The constitutional provision on the reenactment of budget in cases it will fail to pass the appropriation act for the budget year is actually an act of leverage on the plutocratic attitude of Congress to ensure the inclusion of their pork barrel, or the so called congressional insertions or the lump sum allocations.

All of those mentioned in the pork barrel politics in the preparation of the Philippine budget is why we are rewarded as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, no need for qualifications.

The 2012 budget will be played again by this kind of politics and I still believe that the principles promised and the perceived virtue of PNoy will prevail over this despicable practice of looting every Filipino of his earnings.

We are not yet talking about the controlling oligarchs and the patronage in the cycle of implementing the approved budget for what we are saying her is still its preparation.

Just think that in every peso you contribute to the government, with the pork barrel, oligarchy and patronage, you will end up receiving a cent of government services shared by you and the entire Barangay. This is not an exaggeration for this is the truth being the most corrupt government in the world.