Stale

This time, I cleared my schedules and found a comfortable chair to watch the KBP’s joint interview with the presidential candidates. I am not sure it was worth it.

There is a reason why television is nicknamed the boob tube. The medium is constantly time-constrained and therefore tends to be glib. Speaking time is tightly budgeted and adjusted to the shortest attention span. It is not a medium for detail and follow-throughs. This is a medium for sound bites.

The characteristics of the medium are compounded by the fact that we have a multi-candidate race. In the case of the KBP forum, five guests had to compete for speaking time with commercial breaks to enable the enterprise to draw revenues from the content offered.

Had the sixth candidate joined the fray, this format would have been a total mess. Already short, time allocations would have been shortened even more.

I sat a while trying to find a metaphor for the forum, deciding eventually it is like a pudding. A pudding, we know, is a ghastly mash made from stale bread.

All the issues discussed were old and recycled. All the solutions have been thought through by policy wonks. This was a forum that could have been held in 2016 or in 2010 and the same issues would be raised. The same promises would be made.

The only issue that made it distinctly 2022 was the prominence given the state of our public health system. This is because we are all laboring under a pandemic.

Otherwise, we know the problems only too well: corruption, a weak educational system, an underperforming agriculture, low investment rates, a weak manufacturing sector and, hence, high unemployment and widespread poverty. Nothing the candidates said in their opening statements was startling or novel.

Because of the limitations imposed by the medium, none of the participants managed to get into any detail about the strategies they would adopt to address problems of long standing. Nearly everyone promised to increase spending here and there. These were old promises, repeated every election cycle by politicians seeking to capture votes.

Many times, because of strict time allotments, several candidates were cut at mid-sentence. That was jarring.

Leni Robredo was hampered by a poor wireless connection. That was unfortunate. All of us who suffer from choppy connections can commiserate with her predicament.

Most people who observed the KBP forum concluded that the best performer, hands down, in this flawed two-hour spectacle was Ping Lacson. The senator was well prepared and that showed in the quality of his slides. He is a veteran policy wonk and would likely win any debate with ease.

Notwithstanding, the surveys put him close to the bottom of the pile. This raises the question about whether excellence in the televised debates translates into capacity to win the votes.

Ways and means

The panel composed of some of our best journalists ought to be credited for pressing the candidates about the fiscal issues standing in the way of their proposed solutions.

All of the candidates promised to throw tens of billions here and tens of billions there to solve our problems. Very few of them tell us how they will raise the money needed to keep their promises.

At things stand, pandemic-related spending has pushed our public debt stock to just under P12 trillion. From a historic 2019 low of 39.6 percent of GDP, our debt-to-GDP ratio is now just over 60 percent.

The challenge of the next administration is to grow the domestic economy at such a pace that we could outrun the debt. All the candidates, however, promise more spending and not more revenues. They run the whole gamut from increasing spending on education to increasing spending on agriculture to offering free mass testing. None promised to grow the economy.

Only two candidates – Pacquiao and de Guzman – offered concrete policy proposals for raising the revenues we need. Their proposals, however, are patently unworkable.

Pacquiao proposes government increase “non-tax” revenues, sparing him the adverse reaction that would surely follow any proposal to raise taxes. However, “non-tax” revenues, comprising about 6 percent of government’s total take, come from dividends collected from GOCCs and fees collected in exchange for government services.

We will have to impose fees instead of deliver subsidies. Our people will still pay more, many times more, to raise “non-tax” revenues. These will include charging farmers handsomely for irrigation, forcing GOCCs to raise charges (even as some of them were designed to be subsidized) and raising royalties for water distribution.

All options for raising “non-tax” revenues will hit the ordinary citizen eventually. These revenue sources are more prone to corruption.

De Guzman, for his part, proposes a “wealth tax.” This is a reliably popular leftist bait, but it has never worked anywhere.

Just by proposing a “wealth tax,” de Guzman causes distress in the markets. If he wins, our economy will suffer from capital flight.

There are constitutional issues, too, that would hound any attempt to impose a “wealth tax” such as the matter of class legislation and arbitrary imposition. This will certainly not pass Congress.

I recall when Socialist Francois Mitterand campaigned on nationalizing the French banking system, hoping to divert earnings from the financial sector to government coffers. On his first day in office, as he tried to fulfill his promise, capital fled the French economy. In a matter of hours, he reversed his key campaign promise.

Things that sound good on the campaign trail often do not work out in reality.