Inflation-bound

Through all of 2025, we will be battling inflation. It will be an uphill battle—considering we have a government seemingly bent on stoking inflation than quelling it.

- ALEX MAGNO

This year has an unhappy start. President Marcos signed a budget where he vetoed items in his own National Expenditure Plan while leaving intact all the billions in pork barrel funds inserted by our legislators. This is very strange.

As a general feature, the 2025 budget pumps up consumer demand through dole-outs while cutting away economic investments that would improve national productivity. This is the textbook formula for boosting inflation.

In a vain effort to evade constitutionality questions, the line-item veto was used to bring down total public works allocations. Coupled with that, the accounting for "education" spending included outlays for police and military academies and institutions under the supervision of the DOST. The hope here is to delude the public, making it appear that the constitutional command for investments in education to take precedence is satisfied.

Our own government is taking us for fools. The real scandal here is not the bad arithmetic. The real scandal is that we have flushed our children's future down the drain. We have disinvested in building our human capital precisely at a time when credible studies put young Filipinos dead last in international rankings for literacy and numeracy.

While all our regional neighbors are building up their educational systems to exceed global standards, we are allowing ours to simply rot away. We do not have enough classrooms to educate the "demographic sweet spot" now coming into our schools. We have pinned our hopes on the population surge to lift us from underdevelopment. The 2025 budget abandons the young.