Pinged
Days ago, Ping Lacson came out with guns blazing at pork, the Disbursement Acceleration Program, and the Department of Budget and Management. The DAP in particular, he said, constitutes “fiscal dictatorship.”
It was created by two circulars of the DBM that authorized it to pool and use all unspent money in the different departments as it pleased. That, said Lacson, raised the question: “Why do we keep on borrowing when we keep on saving? I would venture a guess: greed and corruption. So those in government can have funds to play around with.”
“While I have no reason to compare President Aquino to former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in handling government funds, too much fiscal discretion by any branch of government will not only be unsupportive of the principle of checks and balances, but will [also] affect the fiscal management efficiency of the national government.”
Well, to begin with, it shows yet again that while people are willing to give P-Noy the benefit of the doubt with perceived budgetary tinkering, or manipulation, they are not so with his people. The subtext of Lacson’s statement is this: “While I have no reason to compare P-Noy with Gloria in handling government funds, I have every reason to compare his people with those of the former regime. They are just as greedy and corrupt.”
Lacson is not an enemy, he is an ally. It makes you wonder how long the President can keep up his current ratings, never mind get back his former ones, with this weight pulling him down.
Beyond this, there’s much to commend Lacson’s comments.
The administration’s defense of the DAP is that it has made the record growth of the past couple of years possible. But while our record growth is unquestionable, praised by various international agencies, the DAP’s pivotal contribution to it is not. It is merely an assertion that is not backed up by proof.
How exactly did the DAP make that record growth possible? All we know is that not spending, or being tight-fisted about, the savings, which was what happened during the first year of the P-Noy administration, was a bad idea. Which compelled the President to tell the DBM to spend the money to spur economic activity. He did not tell the DBM, or Butch Abad in particular, to spend the money this way. For all we know, if DBM had not spent the money by way of the DAP, which is wasteful, we might have had more record rates of growth.
Far less theoretically, what we do know is that the DAP was used in great part for pork. During its first two years, congressional pork rose by one-half (P12.8 billion). The DBM says this sum does not in fact represent pork but actually budgetary items in the national budget. Lacson retorts: If so, why did these items need the lawmakers’ endorsement?
Do we lack for things to spend on that we cannot spend directly, immediately, urgently, instinctively, logically on them? Not at all. At the very least, there’s education, which can do with larger infusions of funds. The state colleges are starved, a good portion of the population remains effectively uneducated, trapping them in ignorance and hopelessness.
Despite education being the No. 1 priority as demanded by the Constitution, and despite the absolute amounts being thrown its way, the budget for education has actually fallen relative to GDP over the years. Spending for education in 1997 and 1998, the last two years of Fidel Ramos’ time, accounted for 3.2 percent of GDP while today it is only 2.1 percent. That’s just a third of the investment in education the UN recommends.
And you give the “savings” instead to pork, with all the spillage, spoilage, and corruption it connotes?
The administration’s other defense of the DAP is that it does not necessarily entail corruption. The legal thorns aside, it is being used for good.
Well, at the very least you give the DBM the awesome power of having “too much fiscal discretion,” to use Lacson’s words, you’ll only have faith to sustain you in your belief it won’t abuse it. The President himself has vouched for Abad’s character, and so have some schools and civic groups, noting that he was a pillar of civil society before he joined government and has become a pillar of government now that he has done so.
Well, P-Noy’s endorsement is another case of him lifting his people up and his people pulling him down, and you just don’t know at this point which has become the stronger force. As to the endorsement of his friends in civil society, that is far more problematic.
I myself claim a right to criticize Abad because I was one of his most ardent defenders when he was rejected as agrarian reform secretary by the Commission on Appointments during Cory’s time for being “pro-farmer.” I found it one of the most astonishingly ironic things in the world, as astonishingly ironic as Bobbit Sanchez being dropped as labor secretary for being “pro-labor.” I said so in the most earnest terms—onli in da Pilipins. It’s yet another astonishing irony that I should call Abad a good boy on the DAR (and a bad boy on the DAP).
The operative word in “he was a pillar of civil society” is “was.” There’s much to be said of the saying “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It cannot aid Abad’s cause that the first thing he did in P-Noy’s administration was to mount a father-and-daughter tandem to man the gates of the Palace, he as keeper of the purse and his daughter as screener of the king. More than anybody’s testimony about character, that is indicative of character, or how someone responds to the gift of power. People do change, and not always for the better. Is this someone you would repose “too much fiscal discretion” on without expecting to see a “fiscal dictatorship?”
If Lacson had been playing the slot machines, you might have heard a loud “Ping!”
