Across the pond, they worry about the craziness that is attending their coming presidential election. I’d like to think that we in the Philippines are way ahead of them in that regard.
“The Trump nightmare,” the New Yorker magazine announced, “continues.” And the vaunted Republican establishment seems helpless against the billionaire’s over-the-top onslaught at the end of Super Tuesday.
This early, Donald Trump looks about ready to secure the nomination of the Grand Old Party. And all those who believe that America’s voters will somehow turn away from the candidate with the outrageous hair and the extreme views, if they still harbor any hope of beating Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in the elections in November, just got clobbered.
An American friend of mine recently told me, apropos of the coming US presidential elections, that the primary system is particularly good at weeding out crazies and other extremists like Trump. The protracted system of delegates voting in sequential primaries, he said, is designed to make people understand that both parties must find a candidate who will appeal to the most number of voters, if they hope to win at all in the general election.
In theory, this means that candidates with extreme views that normally appeal only to fringe groups get winnowed out when November comes along.
On the Democratic side of the equation, the theory seems to be holding. Clinton is proving that her appeal has a broader, more inclusive base than her chief rival, Bernie Sanders, who is widely perceived to be the sort of ultra-progressive, big-government advocate who makes even the most liberal, left-leaning of Democrats nervous.
After an initial defeat to Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton won decisive victories on Super Tuesday. The Dems’ establishment—and the selection process—seems to be working just fine.
Not so on the Republican side. For instance, Trump’s main opponents tried to link the flamboyant real estate developer and reality-show host to the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to paint their rival as just the sort of candidate who is going to ensure a Clinton victory.
That certainly didn’t hurt Trump, who refused to disavow any links to the Klan. Perhaps it even helped burnish Trump’s image as the candidate who wants to expel Muslims from America and build a wall between the US and Mexico—which the Mexicans will supposedly pay for, as well.
Who knows? Maybe Trump will go all the way and beat Clinton, too.
The thing about craziness is, it’s extremely catching. And the collective form of political lunacy that Trump purveys can be extremely hard to cure.
* * *
When the Aquino administration is finally gone, many Filipinos who pay taxes even before they receive their salaries (people like me, for example) will remember how they never seemed to catch a break in six years. And they will recall, as well, how all that talk of “inclusive growth” for the poor meant as much to them as the glowing numbers of macroeconomic improvement —nothing, in short.
The famous fecklessness of President Noynoy Aquino is felt most of all by salaried workers, including those who are now merely hoping to get back some of the money that they saved when they were still working by way of increased pensions. But Aquino has, in the name of defending his nice GDP numbers and his credit ratings, has refused to give back to the very people whose taxes are the lifeblood of the national economy.
But at least one candidate in the coming May elections wants to change a tax system that has kept wage earners from enjoying the largesse given to the oligarchs and the CCT beneficiaries alike. And if only because he proposed exempting workers who make up to P30,000 a month from income taxes, I sure hope Vice President Jejomar Binay deserves some serious consideration.
By now, we all know that the Aquino administration will not even allow the “indexation” of the current two-decade-old income tax brackets that has put people who make P50,000 a month (a bracket that includes many people in supervisory and middle-management positions in the private sector) pay the same maximum 32-percent tax level as the richest Filipinos in the Forbes list. And indexation only means that taxes will be adjusted for the inflation that has increased their salaries but which also took a huge bite out of their purchasing power since the current tax program was implemented during the Ramos years.
And the people who understand our tax scheme will remember that the value-added tax was sold as an alternative to income taxes, which should have been abolished after VAT was implemented. Because VAT is a more just way of collecting taxes, being consumption-based instead of income-based, we agreed to the new scheme —but the government hoodwinked us by imposing both instead.
And yet, it is the wage-earner who suffers most from the inequitable tax regime that Aquino never touched in his six years. If you’re one of those who never got any relief—and who received less and less from a government that demanded more and more —repeat after me: Never again.
