Addicted to pork

It’s hard to close the year without looking back at the ugly fight over lawmakers’ pork barrel — or anything that resembles it — and the graft-ridden pet projects funded by our hard earned money.

Our lawmakers should be ashamed, really. Isn’t it unfair that Filipinos have to shell out hard earned money, and yet our lawmakers just waste this on “whimsical projects?”

Senator Panfilo “Ping” Lacson has maintained that “pork barrel,” or discretionary funds, were inserted in the proposed 2019 national budget.

He said it’s bad enough that we are losing to corruption and to lack of preparation for these projects.

Lacson said the Commission on Audit earlier reported that at least P583 million in government funds were spent on wasteful projects of lawmakers. These projects were stopped because they were found to be irregular or extravagant.

Part of the problem is the lack of coordination with local development councils, he said.

This leads to a disconnect between the needs of the local government units and the budget law crafted by national government agencies.

I hope the Development Budget Coordination Committee and Congress will address this problem. Otherwise, we will continue to see whimsical projects every year and our taxes will just to go waste.

During the plenary debates on the P3.757 trillion national appropriation, Lacson said our dear congressmen realigned items in the budget amounting to P56.7 billion to their respective districts.

Some congressmen received P60 million each for their districts, but Lacson said others got more — P1.9 billion worth of projects, while some got P2.4 billion, of which P500 million went to farm-to-market roads.

This is a lot of money. Our lawmakers should step down from their ivory towers to take a look at what’s happening on the ground, in the houses of common folks.

Filipinos are tightening their belts, cutting down on household expenses to make ends meet.

Just look at the latest household expenditure in the third quarter. It grew by 5.2 percent during the period, slower than the 5.4 percent growth in the same period of 2017, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

Food and non-alcoholic beverages, share 40.1 percent of the total household expenditure, posted a slower growth of 2.8 percent compared with the 4.3 percent growth recorded a year ago, data from the PSA also showed. That’s a decline by almost half.

Isn’t this absurd?

PDAF ruling

Citing the Supreme Court’s (SC) ruling on PDAF or more commonly known as the pork barrel, Lacson said lawmakers committed grave abuse of discretion when they realigned items without consulting them with agencies first.

Whatever happened to the 2013 Supreme Court’s (SC) ruling on PDAF, or more commonly known as the pork barrel, declaring it as unconstitutional?

Of course, we all know that the Supreme Court ruling did not entirely eliminate pork barrel loopholes. It limited the earmarking of projects to the period before the budget law get the final nod of Congress and banned lump sum appropriations.

A reenacted GAA opens opportunities for corruption. Moving forward, the Executive Branch and Congress should reexamine the budget process to avoid realigning of items.

This is where our taxes go

Amid the ugly fight over pork barrel or discretionary funds, Filipinos will be burdened with new taxes next year on top of the new taxes we got this year. Even the business community is quietly sighing in frustration.

It’s not fair, if not downright absurd, that we have to put up with this. As I said, our lawmakers should be ashamed.

There is a pork barrel epidemic and it’s happening at the expense of ordinary Filipinos. This is the kind of addiction that Malacañang should address.

In ancient Greece, a solon was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in archaic Athens.

Here in the land of mayhem, some of our lawmakers are doing exactly the opposite. Those charged with stealing people’s money are even released from prison and are now scot-free.

And yet they call themselves solons.

Iris Gonzales’ e-mail address is [email protected].