Validations of the Alleged Achievements of P-Noy

It all started with P-Noy's favorite topic... WANG-WANG. For him, it symbolizes the abuse of authority by our government officials. They promise to do away with the use of it. He added that eradicating this mindset becomes the symbol of change, not just in our street, but even in our collective attitude.

               

For the last one year and a month of assuming his presidency the wang-wang system isn't out of the topic. Being with it, we can see that there was a minimization of this act. Although it was not that evident by this time, we must admit that somehow the mindset of entitlement has been reduced. According to Aquino's Administration, due to serious fighting of wang-wang their efforts have yielded positive results. 

               

To end the wang-wang culture in government, P-Noy's Administration employed zero-based budgeting to review programs. For this year and the last, zero-based budgeting has allowed them to end many wasteful programs.

               

For example, they uncovered and stopped an ill-advised plan to dredge Laguna Lake. They would have borrowed 18.7 billion pesos to remove 12 million cubic meters of silt—which would have re-accumulated within three years, even before the debt could be fully paid. We also uncovered a food-for-school program with no proper targeting of beneficiaries, and other initiatives that were funded without apparent results. All of these were discontinued, and the funds rechanneled to more effective programs.

               

Even though our government acts as a wang-wang buster, still this attitude exists in some private sector.  According to the BIR, they have around 1.7 million self-employed and professional taxpayers: lawyers, doctors, businessmen who paid a total of 9.8 billion pesos in 2010. This means that each of them paid only an average of 5,783 pesos in income tax—and if this is true, then they each must have earned only 8,500 pesos a month, which is below the minimum wage which is so hard to believe.

               

When it comes to figures according to P-Noy’s SONA, the Philippine economy has improved. Aquino cited as one of the gains of his government the decline in self-rated hunger from 15.1 percent in June from 20.5 percent in March. This is equivalent to one million families who no longer experience hunger, said Aquino. The figures are from the second quarter 2011 hunger survey of the Social Weather Stations (SWS). But if we take a look at the state of our country a lot of people are still poor and have no food to eat. 

Aquino said, "As for business, who would have thought that the stock market would reach seven record highs in the past year? At one time, we thought that for the PSE Index to reach 4,000 points would be, at best, a fluke. We now routinely exceed this threshold."

               

He also added about where taxes go, as he quote "Today we can see that our taxes are going where they should, and therefore there is no reason not to pay the proper taxes. I say to you: it’s not just the government, but our fellow citizens, who are cheated out of the benefits that these taxes would have provided."

Unemployment worsened in Aquino's first year of his administration. This was according to the latest survey of the Social Weather Stations, commissioned by the BusinessWorld daily.  But as far as Aquino is concerned, jobs are being created. In his SONA, he mentioned that the unemployment rate in April went down to 7.2 percent in April 2011 from 8 percent during the same period last year, crediting the efforts of his administration. Some 1.4 million jobs have been supposedly created in his first year. The numbers are from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) of the National Statistics Office (NSO).

The 1.4 million jobs supposedly created between April 2011 and April 2010 could not be attributed to government intervention. In the first place, the only job generation program that the Aquino administration has so far initiated is the Community Based Employment Program (CBEP). This program has only created 170,000 jobs out of a target of 1.1 million. About 63% of these jobs are in infrastructure/construction, of low quality, and highly temporary. The 170,000 could even be deceitful because a worker can avail of more than one CBEP job.

Looking at the NSO data, more than 456,000 jobs of the 1.4 million additional jobs are classified as those who worked for private households (domestic help, etc.), self-employed without any paid employee (vendor or sari-sari store owner, etc.), employer in own-family operated farm or business, and worked without pay in own-family operated farm or business. In other words, a significant part of the additional employment in the past year was due to the people’s sariling diskarte and not because of any meaningful job generation program of government.

                                    Figures in '000

Because of such distortions, the number of jobless according to the April 2011 LFS of the NSO is just 2.9 million workers. In contrast, adult unemployment rate as measured by the SWS in its own survey was pegged at 27.2% or 11.3 million workers in March 2011. Based on SWS data, the average adult unemployment rate under Aquino is 23.2%, a continuation of the deteriorating domestic jobs situation. Under Arroyo, it was just 19.77%; Estrada, 9.66%; and Fidel Ramos, 9.66%.

Aquino cited as one of the gains of his government the decline in self-rated hunger from 15.1 % in June from 20.5% in March. This is equivalent to one million families who no longer experience hunger, said Aquino. The figures are from the second quarter 2011 hunger survey of the Social Weather Stations (SWS).

But quarterly hunger surveys are sometimes volatile (e.g. self-rated hunger fell from 21.1% to 15.9% in Aquino’s first 100 days) so it is important to look at the long-term trend. In the first year of the Aquino administration, quarterly self-rated hunger averaged 17.4%. During the nine years of the Arroyo government, it averaged a lower 14.58% and just 9.96% under deposed President Joseph Estrada. These numbers indicate that the country is still on the path of worsening hunger.

Aquino also claimed that in his first year as President, the Philippines got upgraded four times by credit rating agencies. Compare this, said Aquino, to the lone credit upgrade and six downgrades the country had in the nine and a half years of the Arroyo administration. A high credit rating means lower interest payments. According to Aquino, the country spent P23 billion less in interest payments from January to April 2011 compared to the same period last year. This amount can supposedly already cover the 2.3 million families in target beneficiaries of the CCT program until the end of the year.

But the credit rating upgrades came at a high cost for the people. To obtain the upgrades, the Aquino administration ensured that debt obligations are being paid dutifully and at the same time resorted to massive under-spending. The result is that an ever increasing portion of spending by the national government went to debt servicing. Since Aquino became President, total debt servicing has already reached P668.65 billion (from July 2010 to May 2011). Until April this year, 49.3% of what the Aquino administration has spent went to debt servicing.

Compare these figures to those under Arroyo, who has been criticized as a heavy borrower and payer. Monthly debt servicing during the Arroyo administration was P48.18 billion while in the first 11 months of the Aquino presidency, it went up to P60.79 billion.  As a percentage of total government spending (including principal payments), the average during the Arroyo administration was 41.5% while under Aquino, it has increased to 49.3% (until April 2011).

Despite the bigger debt servicing, the total outstanding debt of government (including contingent debt) still rose from P5.19 trillion in June 2010 to P5.23 trillion as of April 2011. The P40-billion rise in government debt includes $400 million (about P18 billion) in loans from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) approved last September 2010 to help bankroll the expanded CCT program. This means that the P23 billion mentioned by Aquino as savings from lower interest payments will just be used to pay for the rising debt obligations of government, including those incurred for the CCT.

The credit rating upgrades were also achieved due to the improvement in the national budget deficit, another indicator closely watched to determine a country’s creditworthiness. From an all-time high (in absolute terms) of P314.5 billion in deficit in 2010, the Aquino administration has been able to substantially reduce the shortfall so far this year. From January to May 2011, the fiscal deficit was pegged at just P9.54 billion or 94.1% below the deficit during the same period in 2010. It is also way below the programmed deficit of P152.13 billion for the first half of the year. This lower deficit was made possible by higher revenues and lower spending during the period. As compared to the first five months of 2010, revenues are higher by P81.5 billion while spending is down by P71.08 billion. Furthermore, monthly collections are more than P1.89 billion higher than expected while monthly expenditures are almost P21.55 billion lower than programmed.

Facts and figures that truly matter to the people have been ignored in Aquino’s SONA – P125 or the amount of legislated minimum wage hike workers have long been demanding to help them cope with ever rising cost of living; 6,453 hectares or the size of Hacienda Luisita lands that should have long been owned and controlled by farmers and farm workers; 556,526 or the number of families living in informal settlements in Metro Manila and face the threat of forced eviction; 27 or the number of times that diesel prices have gone up since Aquino became President; and 48 or the number of victims of extrajudicial killings in his first year as Chief Executive, among others.

Satisfaction on Aquino’s administration was down in terms of disaster preparedness, and also in fighting terrorism and crime, although non-government organizations have already challenged the newly sworn-in president to prioritize disaster-preparedness. But as far as Aquino’s administration is concerned, there were improvements on weather forecasting by PAG-ASA. Same is true with PHIVOLCS and NDRRMC.

By using numbers, the President hoped to be objective in presenting his administration’s supposed achievements during the SONA. But he ended up ignorant of the numbers that truly matter.