AS a new administration takes over today, it is an opportune time to consider what Filipinos want.
A recent study of national aspirations by the National Economic and Development Authority suggests that 80 percent of Filipinos want to have a simple and comfortable life—marked by a stable job, and ownership of a house and a car.
To achieve this goal, Neda suggests, a household of four would need a gross monthly income of P120,000 per family. The amount, the agency adds, assumes that a comprehensive tax reform program is already in place.
Neda Director-General Emmanuel Esguerra suggests that the “simple and comfortable” lifestyle is a middle class goal. The P120,000 monthly figure, he says, factors in amortizations that would have to be made for a car and a house and lot, as well as taxes that would need to be paid, and allowances for emergencies.
Begun last year and completed in February, Ambisyon Natin 2040 used face-to-face interviews with 10,000 people across all economic classes to determine the medium-term and short-term aspirations of Filipinos regarding their standard of living, finances, security and ease of transacting with the go vernment within one generation.
Neda officials are understandably optimistic that these aspirations can be met, but the reality on the ground is that very few Filipinos can claim this “middle-class” income of P120,000 a month and are far from achieving it.
In fact, government statistics show that one in four families scrape by with only P8,000 a month, the ridiculously low income threshold that bureaucrats have set before a family can be officially described as poor. This enables the government to claim to be making headway against poverty by the simple expedient of lowering the threshold, but it does little to help those who eke out an existence, say, at P9,000 or P10,000 a month.
The previous administration took an ill-advised dole program from the Arroyo years and threw tens of billions of pesos more into the mix as a way of addressing poverty—without doing anything about generating better-paying jobs for blue- and white-collar workers, or higher incomes for agricultural families.
Even the Neda admits that these middle-class aspirations will only be possible if incomes grow and if inequalities are addressed such that not only the top 5 percent or 10 percent of the population benefit from economic growth.
President Benigno Aquino III, who steps down today, once promised on his campaign trail that he would eradicate poverty by wiping out corruption. This, we now know, was a big lie in more ways than one. First, he fought only corruption practiced by his political opponents and let his friends and allies misuse public funds with no danger of punishment. But the bigger lie was that licking corruption isn’t the silver bullet to eliminating poverty. Stable, well-paying jobs are—and we can only hope that the incoming administration will do a better job at encouraging this kind of employment than its predecessor did.