President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III (photo from www.gov.ph)
The Aquino Administration submitted its budget proposal for 2011 to Congress this week. It is through the budget where one can see the priorities of the government, in how much it intends to spend on various programs of government. For 2011, the government under the Aquino administration intends to spend P1.645 trillion.
In his budget message, the President claimed that the spending proposal of the government for next year is anchored on “reform”. The budget claims to have a “bias to the poor and the vulnerable”. However, right at the onset, it is still oriented towards severe austerity, masked with the euphemism “fiscal responsibility,” a government spending orientation that has been the standard policy for decades. It is a policy intended not to simply ensure that the “meager resources” of the government are spent wisely for the people, to ensure that the government is able to pay its foreign and local creditors its monstrous, anomalous and scandalous debt.
Just to show you how scandalous and hypocritical the government’s budget orientation is, the Aquino Administration proposes to pay foreign creditors and financial institutions a whopping P823.27 billion next year (P357.09 billion in interest payments, P466.18 billion in principal amortization not formally included in the P1.645 trillion total budget). According to the initial budget analysis and report of IBON Foundation, the increase in interest payments alone “is the largest absolute increase in interest payments in the country’s history and, at a 29.2% increase from the year before, is the second largest percentage increase after the 32.6% growth in 2000.”
law student, national democracy activist, film school graduate, photography hobbyist