Where has part of our taxes gone?
Taxes, we know, are the lifeblood of the state. If it is a fact that a man dies without blood, no state can also exist without taxes. That is why we accept this oxymoron of a concept that taxes are forced contributions for indeed, why should they be considered as our contributions if they are forced upon us?
We are compelled to pay taxes because these are the funds with which our government can provide services. One specific example of such service that government does for its citizenry is the collection of garbage. The solid waste management that government adopts is understandably a complex system even if all studies are aimed at simplifying it. Can we imagine the scenario if there is no government agency charged with getting people’s rubbish? Or viewed from the citizens’ side, it is most chaotic if each one of us brings our garbage to wherever.
The business permit that our law office secures every year has a component for the collection of garbage. The fee charged against us is to pay the city’s Department of Public Services or the barangay’s garbage section in collecting whatever little waste we generate. While the lawyers in our office pore over their books and work on their papers beyond the regular office hours, we have not benefited, all these years, from the kind of garbage collection service the city and the barangay are supposed to provide within or outside usual work hours. Anyway, because our paper waste is minimal, we take it home for disposal and so we simply rest in the notion that the fee we pay is our little contribution to public weal.
Our situation at home in Barangay Kasambagan is rather different. There was a time in the past that we benefited from the services provided by the city and the barangay governments. On certain days, the city personnel collected our garbage and the barangay garbage men on other days. For reasons unknown to us, our garbage has not been collected the last six months, more or less. In my recollection, since September 2016, no garbage truck from the city or our barangay has come to pick up our refuse. We have faithfully performed our part of the simple system we know of and that is to wait, early in the morning, for collectors to get our waste in exchange of part of our taxes. No one came. The garbage trucks just whizzed by and never cared to stop to get our refuse. We asked ourselves if we were affected by the closure of the Inayawan landfill. But we noticed that the garbage of some selected neighbors was collected.
In order to dispose of our waste these last several months, I took them, on Saturdays, to the mountain barangay of Paril, 22 kilometers away from my home where I happen to own a very small parcel of land. In Barangay Paril, I would dig a hole and deposit our waste after which I return the soil to cover it. The process is quite taxing, somewhat costly and extremely oppressive, if we consider that I religiously pay my taxes in the correct amount I am obligated with.
I write this article today to request our authorities to give us the kind of service we pay our garbage fee for. Mindful that we are ordinary taxpayers of city, we may sound too demanding to address this request to His Honor, Mayor Tomas R. Osmeña, and our newly installed Barangay Captain Franklin Ong, but I do not know of any more responsible officers to complain to. Of course, they may not listen to this plea in much the same way that our calls to the DPS and the barangay hall have fallen on deaf ears.
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