WHEN it comes to proposals to ease the economic burden on working-class Filipinos, the President has a standard excuse these days for going the other way. Let us not do what is politically expedient or popular just because it is an election year, he likes to say. Let us do what is right.
This was what he said last year when he rejected a bill to reduce personal income taxes—already among the highest in Southeast Asia. Never mind if the move would bring welcome relief to millions of overtaxed workers, it would also result in lost tax revenues of P30 billion and would hurt the country’s credit rating, the President said. A Palace spokesperson added that in rejecting the tax proposal, the President was not concerned with popularity, but rather the long-term effects of his actions on other government programs, which might lose their funding.
The President returned to this theme last week, when he vetoed a bill that would have added P2,000 across the board to Social Security System pensions for some two million retirees.
Defending his decision, Aquino said it would have been easier to sign the bill, which might help his candidates get elected this year. But this, he said, would deplete the SSS fund and hurt its 31-million members.
Mr. Aquino’s anointed candidate, former Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II, has fallen in lockstep behind the President on both issues—rejecting the bill to lower income tax rates and defending the President’s veto of the SSS pension hike.
“All of our decisions and actions will have an effect,” Roxas said. “What is important here is the reason, and I would agree and support that it isn’t correct…that for political points, because we have elections, that we will destroy the future of more than 31 million who contribute to the SSS.”
In claiming to take the high road, the President and Roxas imply that those who favor the tax cuts and the pension hike are doing so merely to pander to the public and to gain votes.
The view is both flawed and supercilious, and overlooks the fact that we have a popular democracy and that all politicians—even the ones in power—must answer to the people every three years by way of elections.
We believe, in fact, that this is precisely the time to make our voices heard and to politicize these issues of taxation and pension benefits. There is no better time to compel each candidate to commit to a course of action that would ease the financial burden of millions of workers.
To suggest that the administration candidates are somehow above all this is arrogant and callous—and clearly marks the kind of people we should not be voting into office again.