Thursday, August 28, 2008 So: A trillion pesos By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
I asked two editors and our group comptroller how many zeros a trillion has.
One editor promptly said nine like she had it in her bank account, the other said 12 and the comptroller patiently wrote down for me the succession of digits.
1,000,000 one million; 1,000,000,000 one billion; 1,000,000,000,000 one trillion. Wow, I can draw 12 different faces on one trillion but I wouldn’t know how to spend a trillion pesos. Fortunately for President Arroyo, she knows how to use the money in one year.
She will use that amount to carry out her programs that will address the “world food and fuel crises” as well as power the country’s economy and prop up its environment and education agenda.
This means that we are to expect better and more roads, more public classrooms, better agricultural yield, better health and social welfare services and, eeek!, bigger taxes. Among these expectations, only the last one appears to be certain.
The national budget comes in a voluminous folder that only the country’s budget department has the enthusiasm and wakefulness to go over it like it was a John Grisham or Neil Gaiman novel. If they were to review it, they would probably say, “Un-put-downable! Superb!” or “Warm, funny, immensely entertaining. A great bed companion.” My review would be,
“This makes a great dumb bell.”
The proposed 2009 national budget, which the executive department submitted to Congress yesterday, is 15 percent higher than the 2008 budget of P1.2 trillion.
In the proposed P1.4-trillion budget, there will be an increase in the allocations for agriculture, public works and highways, education, social welfare and Philhealth. The report in www.sunstar.com.ph neither mentions figures nor anything about sports development, so we better stop griping about how our government has failed to develop a sports program geared toward international competitions. Let’s gripe instead about how our government has failed to develop a sports program geared toward inter-barangay meets.
The 2009 budget, should anyone other than the budget department care to know, is based on performance. Sort of like a salary increase using the bell curve.
As explained by Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ralph Recto, the performance-based budget policy is anchored on the productivity of a particular department in the current year. Departments that carried out projects within its 2008 funding “will naturally get more resources” and those that spend heavily such as the social welfare and health departments “will get more resources.”
I don’t know if this is sound budgeting considering that some of these departments have not been prudently spending taxpayers’ money. Nevertheless, Recto offers us a glimpse of the state of our sports affairs in the years to come.
If Congress approves the budget of P1.4 trillion Arroyo is proposing for her to run the country in 2009, that would leave each of the 88.57 million Filipinos living in the Philippines an individual allocation of P15,807 from his government.
At the end of 2009, I’ll be asking the government for an accounting of my P15,807, the sum supposedly it had spent on me in one year. I can’t handle 12 zeros unless they have facial expressions drawn on them.
By the way, the word “trillionaire” is not in the dictionary so the Philippines, despite a P1.4 trillion national budget, cannot be called a trillionaire. So what?
