Editorial - Time for pro-poor gov'tto review tax structures

Lost in the furor over the Supreme Court decision freeing Hubert Webb and several others in connection with the Vizconde Massacre is that news report about many of the country's richest men not turning out to be the country's biggest taxpayers.

How could that be? But before you could even start to figure out a decent answer for yourself, along comes the BIR commissioner herself, Kim Henares, taking up the cudgels for the moguls.

Henares, hand-picked by President Aquino in his supposed fight against corruption, did not allow the moguls to explain themselves. Instead, as if speaking on their behalf, Henares said the BIR taxes income, not assets.

Whatever that means to the rest of the poor taxpayers, the fact remains that the moguls are paying far less in taxes in relation to their riches than the poor taxpayers in relation to theirs.

And even if corruption has nothing to do with this gross inequity, clearly there is something wrong in the country's taxation system where poor wage earners eventually dread wage increases for fear the small increments will bring them over to the next higher taxation level.

In case the government has not realized it, there are many instances where a wage hike of, say, a hundred pesos, will move the earning of a worker to the next bracket where his taxes will be a thousand pesos higher.

A worker in this case would rather that his salary not be increased by a meager hundred pesos lest he be taxed a thousand pesos more. Workers in this case are paying more taxes, percentage-wise, than the filthy rich moguls, and the government does not even blink.

Take the case of one such mogul, one of the richest in the country, and among the richest in the world, who, according to the report, paid only something like nine million. The owner of one of the country's biggest banks paid, believe it or not, only five million pesos.

Percentage wise, or the relation between personal worth and taxes paid, many teachers, soldiers, policemen, firefighters, journalists, office clerks -- people who break their backs or lay their lives on the line -- pay more taxes vis a vis their earnings than the moguls.