To be poor in the Philippines, where 108 million people live, must now be a virtue, with an official of the Philippine Statistics Authority defending the P10,481 estimated minimum budget needed by a family of five to survive in a month.
The defense has roused flaming sparks flying haphazardly from Batanes to Tawi Tawi, not helped any by the endorsing argument of the Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo that if you ask the poor “they will tell you that they will get by with salt.”
That’s literally rubbing salt into the palpable poverty that cannot be concealed in the economic rungs of our society.
We would have wished we had good reasons to be more prudent today, while majority of our countrymen commemorate the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, when palm branches were placed in his path, before his arrest on Maundy Thursday and his crucifixion on Good Friday, which marks the final week of Lent.
Golgotha has come too soon, it seems, to the Filipinos crying for solutions and resolutions to their parasitic poverty, with defense of a token budget for a family of five people, shamelessly insulting and unrealistic, to say the least.
And a disobliging government even suggests that despite the rising costs of subsistence among Filipinos, it believes the poverty incidence has dropped, with the National Economic and Development Authority saying the 6.6 percent plunge in poverty rate can be attributed to what it calls the sustained economic development and reforms undertaken by the Duterte administration.
We agree with those who say that the figures dished out by the PSA for a family’s survival are in the highest rung of self-absorption, an impudent daydream among those who never experience a gurgling stomach.
The argument at the same time tries to maintain a rigorously damaging status quo and stops employers, their pronouncements of care and disquietude notwithstanding, from addressing their employees’ growing grievance despite their unfailing productivity.
We have a sympathetic mind and heart for those who cry out for better wages to help them grapple with, among others, the traditional list of food, water, clothing, shelter, sanitation, healthcare, transportation, education and, in the modern list, the internet.
Indeed, the current dagger is disturbingly dreadful.