See? What did I tell you. This government truly looks upon Filipinos living in the Philippines as second class citizens. They do not get treated in the same way as OFWs, for whom it is always willing to go out on a limb or bend over backward to please and accommodate. Recently, a bill filed in the House of Representatives seeking to lower income taxes filed by fixed income workers in the Philippines drew a swift response from Malacañang -- stop such a folly.
The bill, if passed into law, would have given working Filipinos in the Philippines tremendous breathing space. Income taxes in the Philippines, at a high of 33 percent, are the highest in Southeast Asia and among the highest in the world. An income tax of 33 percent means a whole one third of a Filipino worker's pay in the Philippines is taken by government.
That means the Filipino worker in the Philippines -- let us call him FWP -- will have to stretch the remaining two-thirds of his wages to cover everything from water to power to phone bills. Then there is the rent and the tuition, plus clothing, transportation and medication. Whatever is left in the budget goes to food, which for the lowliest worker seldom deviates from rice, noodles and sardines.
The FWP, whose every peso earned is 45 pesos less than the dollar his OFW counterpart earns, has to wake up before everyone else at 3 a.m. if he lives in Metro Manila to be able to make it to his 8 a.m. job on time. Off at 5 p.m., he would be lucky to find somebody still awake by the time he gets home at 10 p.m. With such a touch-and-go family life, he is only slightly better than his OFW counterpart.
And yet the government has done scant little to make his life more bearable. Aside from the hellish traffic, public transportation is anything but utilities of convenience. They have become virtual death traps from years of official neglect by corrupt officials. There appears to be an official conspiracy to keep Filipinos at home in a perpetual state of need and negligence in order for them to become perpetually dependent on the patronage of politicians.
Compare their lot to that of an OFW. When an OFW goes astray in his country of employment and gets convicted in accordance with that country's laws, the entire Philippine officialdom gets mobilized to his aid. Even the president and vice president, in separate initiatives, would make a pitch for their freedom unmindful of the spectacle it made in light of the nature of the offense -- murder, drug smuggling, etc.
But when an FWP finds himself in a similar situation, that is virtually the end of him. Thrown into the labyrinth of offending humanity cramped in Philippine prisons, what reformatory or correctional pretenses these institutions may pay lip service to, he is doomed to become even more dark and vicious, what with these dens doubling as houses of prostitution and drug laboratories.
Where an OFW at least enjoys social stability, civic order and a professional environment in most of the countries that you find him in, his FWP counterpart is no longer even safe in his own home. Where an OFW can at least send his kids to the best schools back home with the times-46 pay he gets, his FWP only manages to afford the public school system where children share books five-to-one in classrooms that hold 60 or more in three-shift classes that start at 5 a.m. and end at 9 p.m.
Public health is wanting. Infrastructure is crumbling. Crime is escalating. Illegal drugs, which funds campaigns, is given free rein. There is hardly a functioning government left in the Philippines, at least as far as meeting its obligations to its citizens is concerned. Life in the Philippines is pretty much every man for himself. What makes government still palpable is only due to its constant stirring in politicking.
But when the OFW does so much as tweet or post a threat to articulate displeasure at a bid by an agency of government to function as it should, government, together with all the politicians who give it the substance it deserves, swiftly chastises that very agency of government -- much like a snake eating up its own tail -- for antagonizing the OFW. It is not that the agency was not doing its job. It was about who it was doing its job against.
If the train an FWP is on falls off its rails, or the garbage piles up on his street, or the cop who is supposed to protect him holds him up, or the power is on for only eight hours and his water drips for only the same amount of time, the government does not give a damn. When somebody tries to lift his burden a bit by proposing to cut his taxes, government puts up a tantrum. But when someone so much as thinks of touching a balikbayan box, government promptly shrieks: Come to mama.