How the 2023 national budget was approved will be no different from how the country will be run/managed in the years to come. But we can always pray and hope to survive.
Questions: What much of our national budget (year in and year out) is accomplishing aside from squandering borrowed wealth and furthering corruption and criminality? In what way have the questionable allocations (blindly approved) contributed and can contribute to good governance, much less in alleviating the plight of the Filipino people and improving our economy?
With the total of P9.29 billion confidential and intelligence funds, along with the other dubious portions in the budget, can we not well address inflation or our food crisis (as an agricultural country) so that we don’t have to import rice, fish, sugar, salt, vegetables, even onions, etc.? Why reminisce the past mistakes to justify the repeat of the same today?
How many schools, classrooms, clinics, roads and potable water facilities can be built for our people in the neglected areas of the country with such a staggering amount of their money about to be dumped to crooked wallets and meaningless, aimless, senseless projects and programs?
Truth be told, if ever there’s a need for confidential and intelligence funds with their touted purposes of use, would the nation rather do well to spend them on information gathering and surveillance operations, vis-a-vis our corrupt politicians, officials, police and military people? Does it not behoove the Filipinos to uncover the illegal, illegitimate, immoral and criminal activities of scoundrels in the government – using their positions to perpetuate themselves in power, amass wealth and indulge in lifestyles that are not commensurate with their salaries as “public servants”?
Finally, what is the issue in all the unidentified, unspecified, unaccountable and unexplainable portions of our yearly national budget? Answer: It’s all of the above. And none of them ought to be about “administration versus opposition” or politics. But with the way things went and are going in the Senate and Lower House, it all points to our pernicious, disastrous, lethiferous, unique brand of corrupt politics.
Hence, the Philippines ever lags behind its Asian neighbors.
