A new beginning?

After more than a four-year absence from this space, this column resumes effective today and every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday hereafter. I’m tickled pink to be back, and raring to share views with you about issues of national concern. The STAR was my column’s home for over ten years. I had to go only when I joined government. I jokingly refer to that time as my period of temporary insanity. Truthfully, though, I can’t really say that on balance I regretted either my brief service in government or my ill-fated foray into electoral politics, but I’ll have more to say about that in my future columns. Promise.

For now, let’s plunge right into the morass of –what else? – our very real fiscal crisis. Everyone and his uncle, driver and barber are talking about the crisis and what we need to do to get beyond it. We are all looking for a new beginning, a fresh start, in our style of governance. Well, do we look like we’re getting that new beginning?

I, for one, am not too sure. Our political leadership seems to be forgetting that the crisis is not in the realm of the potential or the merely possible. It’s not going to happen – maybe! – in a couple of years. The crisis is now. Decisive action cannot be postponed ‘til sunnier climes arrive. The Executive and the Congress, though, seem to be acting like we can keep talking about this crisis forever.

We have a small window to avert the worst impact of the crisis. Once this window closes – and it will, if we persist in this false optimism our flesh seems to be heir to – the worst is sure to happen. And for "the worst", you can think Argentina, you can think Thailand in 1997, you can think all those unthinkables that happen to nations that become pariahs in the international financial community. You can also think food riots, labor unrest, military adventurism, and political instability worse than Marcos before the fall.

If you think I’m exaggerating, you haven’t read carefully what that group of U.P. professors said in their now famous paper on the deepening fiscal deficit and public debt crisis. In addition, you aren’t privy to what PGMA’s economic advisers, in or now out of office, have been saying in private. All put on brave faces in public, all still carefully sugarcoat their prognostications with paeans to the innate courage, resiliency and civic spirit of the Filipino. Nevertheless, the air of extreme urgency, while not quite amounting to panic, is unmistakable.

Some of you, dear readers, may be saying, "Yes, but what about Congressman Joey Saludo’s Roadmap to Fiscal Rehabilitation which is also Malacanang’s ‘no-pain, no-gain’ scenario?" That assumes, of course, that all our legislators accept Joey’s plan, much of which will require new laws or amendments to existing laws. That would be a big assumption because many of the legislators I’ve spoken to aren’t buying Joey’s plan at all.

But the fiscal crisis is no mere public relations problem. Now is not the time to muck around with half-measures. These measures might be sincere and well-intentioned. We might convince ourselves that we are being truly patriotic. In reality, they are not the decisive and fundamental steps we must take.

Moreover, addressing the fiscal crisis entails a process which will not play itself out in just one budget year. The measures we take will stay with us for several years. The tax revenue measures already proposed by PGMA are only a first step. The cost saving measures purportedly already being implemented will have to be sustained over several years.

Our problems will not be solved by holding the line on the internal revenue allotments of local governments for one year only. Substantial savings will not be realized by cutting pork barrel, partially or totally, for only the 2005 budget year. Note this well: Because the 2004 budget is a re-enacted budget from the pervious year, no pork barrel cutbacks are slated for the current budget year. Moreover, an unidentified Senate official has revealed that the pork is still in the proposed 2005 budget.

Now, take this proposal for a Bayanihan Fund and include all those other pass-the-hat-around or ambagan – i.e. contributions – schemes to raise money from private sources to be transferred to government for use in public projects. I know there have been a lot of positive responses to the proposed Fund. And if big industrialists, taipans, and ordinary citizens want to fork over cash, our hats off to them. On the example of South Koreans turning over some family jewels to the government, some geniuses thought of the same idea here. But, as usual, we’ve done the South Koreans one better.

Some leading politicians have even button-holed wealthy businessmen who accompanied the President on a recent state visit and "persuaded" them to cough up some pledges of monetary donations. As I said, bully for them! Some of those same businessmen are privately grumbling that "irresistible pressure" was applied on them. Not even the comfort rooms on the crowded aircraft could afford refuge, they claim. Some businessmen who slithered early into the lavatories took inordinately long periods of time performing their ablutions, or emerged only when the captain announced the final landing approach to the airport of destination. They were button-holed anyway.

The Bayanihan Fund, and all similar funds, may be well-intentioned and sincere, but they are not the kind of support the government needs from our people. While the money collected may indeed fund some government projects like school houses and health facilities, they will not equal the billions needed for necessary infrastructure and social services the government must provide. Those projects, by the way, were already being undertaken by private enterprises and several non-government organizations even when the Bayanihan Fund wasn’t yet a seed in someone’s fertile imagination.

I am absolutely certain these donors are not the tax evaders GMA has vowed to hound. Money from tax cheats and our local versions of Mafia dons engaging in eleemosynary acts to guarantee their admission into Heaven is unwelcome. But will our good donors be as uncomplaining when prices of power and fuel go up markedly, or when costs of virtually everything rise steeply, as they surely will when government makes good its promise to cease subsidizing government-owned and controlled corporations? Will they go along meekly when the National Power Corporation is allowed to charge rates at levels which guarantee it a fair return and allow the privatization effort to finally move forward?

The Bayanihan Fund is only one example of misplaced preoccupations in the fight against the fiscal crisis. There are others, which we will take up in succeeding columns.