EDITORIAL – How much did Pacquiao earn? How much is he paying in taxes?

Okay, four days is enough. The national euphoria over the unanimous decision victory of Manny Pacquiao over Marco Antonio Barrera should have settled down by now. It is now time to put things into context. We have given Pacquiao his due so it is now time for him to give some of it back.

We are referring specifically to how much Pacquiao earned, and how much he is expected to pay in taxes. Sorry we have to ask, but our suspicions have been aroused, not just now, four days after the fight, but long before the fight took place.

There is a possibility we may have missed an account of how much Pacquiao was supposed to get. But if there was such an account, it certainly got buried in the vast amount of news space and air time the media devoted in hyping up the fight, before and after it happened.

Now, any journalist worth his salt should tell you that how much Pacquiao was getting for the fight, as well as his share of the pay-per-view receipts, should be just as interesting as the fight. In fact, only sex is perhaps more interesting than money in this world.

So then, if that is the case, why was it, that in the miles and miles of column inches devoted to the story on Pacquiao-Barrera II, and the hours and hours of air time allotted to the same, there was never ever any mention of the fight purse?

Is there a conspiracy here to defraud the government of its due in taxes? We certainly hope not, because that would be a big let-down, considering the stature of Pacquiao as a national hero of sorts. But we cannot help asking, especially in light of previous incidents when vehicles brought in by the boxer got embroiled in a tax mess.

We are pretty sure that whatever purse Pacquiao got for the fight will be drastically eaten into by taxes he has to pay in America. He also got into a tax mess there once but he is not going to get into a similar mess this time. The US is a no-nonsense country when it comes to collecting taxes.

The same cannot be said about our country, though, especially if you have very sympathetic friends in high places who may need the kind of popularity Pacquiao has to bail them out of their own unpopularity. When people watched Pacquiao fight, they paid through the nose for tickets laced with taxes. Pacquiao should do the same.