A good proportion of our millennials now spend their days before, during and after Undas traveling as local tourists to our natural, heritage, and recreational destinations throughout the country.
Apparently, they’ve been enticed by government promotions to visit our tourist spots by taking advantage of vacation deals, travel specials, and cheap hotel accommodations.
They could have saved their extra money, of course, by paying additional contributions to the Social Security System, and thereby support the pension increase requirements of their elderly parents.
Most of us baby boomers still prefer spending Undas by remembering our departed loved ones with members of our families and clans. For us who now live abroad or have moved to the city, it is also a season for visiting our birthplace and renewing our kinship with relatives and childhood friends even for a few hours at the cemetery.
Unfortunately, this year’s Nov. 2 was not declared a non-working holiday. Hence, most of us had to rush back home in the afternoon of Undas to resume our life in the city.
These Undas trips had become journeys of chaos and hardship, similar to what they are during Holy Week and the Christmas season.
But by and large, traveling was relatively cheaper, more convenient, and safer in this year’s Undas. We didn’t mind, therefore, when President Digong didn’t even try to inspect our airports, seaports and bus terminals.
We appreciated, though, that there was no more “laglag bala” to fear in traveling via the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Still, we wonder: Whose bright idea was it to look for hidden bullets in the luggage of our airline passengers?
My erudite senior citizen friends—who still can replay from memory important chess games of our grandmasters—know of some chess players who still keep bullets as lucky charms or amulets against their opponents. They don’t remember, however, any untoward incident in airplanes or at airport toilets that a smuggled bullet caused.
Like last year, this year’s four-day Undas period has provided my senior citizen friends plenty of opportunity to quiz me on the much-awaited P2,000 SSS pension increase.
After all, both houses of congress have agreed to grant it again.
Senator Cynthia Villar, one of the strong supporters of the increase at the Senate, has even announced that she expected it to be signed into law soon enough to be the chamber’s “early Christmas gift to the 1.9 million SSS pensioners.”
Not to be outdone, Rep. Jesus Sacdalan, the chairman of the House Committee on Government Enterprises and Privatization, also announced about its impending approval by his committee in its Nov. 15 hearing “with or without the presence of SSS officials.”
We believed President Digong when he promised during the campaign period that he’d approve the P2,000 pension increase bill once it is submitted to him.
We are thus salivating now about its release.
And when Dean Amado Valdez—his newly appointed Social Security Commission chairman—called his first press conference last Oct. 28, we thought that he’d already announce the agency’s unconditional endorsement of the increase to Congress.
He didn’t even bother coordinating with the incumbent SSS president and chief executive officer. After all, Dean Valdez has been very vocal about its release as President Digong’s singular marching order to him.
Like a pension expert, he repeated for the record that—
“Implementing the P2,000 increase would require an additional P56 billion in the first year alone to fund the 12 monthly pensions and 13th month pensions of more than two million SSS pensioners.”
But he left us flabbergasted after he proceeded to set as condition for its release the identification by Congress of its source of funding.
He then proceeded to propose six options on how to implement it without bankrupting SSS by 2025.
The first option—which was what my senior citizen friends only understood of the six options—was an installment plan of four equal annual increases of P500 starting in 2017 until 2020.
We got lost in the complexity of the other five options, and could only note that “in the second option, the increase is implemented yearly based on five age groups and with the first tranche covering the oldest pensioners. The first group will receive the P2,000 increase in 2017, the second in 2018, and so on down the line.”
The rest of the options were convoluted hybrids of these two options.
Even if we pensioners didn’t fully comprehend the six options, we could sense that each of them would make us wait before we could receive the P2,000 pension increase.
In fact, the SSC chairman has made us worry with his concluding remarks that “merely mandating to grant across-the-board pension increase without any mention of how exactly the system will sustain it over the long term may not suffice.”
Seeing that none of his options matched the simplicity of the pending Congressional bills, we are seeing once again another pension deadlock between SSS and Congress.
A wise and caring President Digong could break it, of course, but he has to ask the millennials to increase their contributions.
