The Philippines, according to a recent worldwide Gallup poll, is the third happiest place on the planet. But if the government isn’t careful, that unusually giddy ranking could slide to more realistically despondent levels in the new year.
This year marks the first that the Duterte administration is implementing a painful but necessary tax reform program, known by its more easily remembered acronym TRAIN. And already, there are signs that President Rodrigo Duterte’s tax scheme may be headed for a bumpy ride.
The TRAIN program seeks to swap tax breaks for more Filipinos while raising more revenues to fund the Duterte government’s ambitious multi-trillion-peso infrastructure program. The first part is intended to provide relief to taxpayers who haven’t had their rising incomes adjusted for inflation in relation to the taxes they pay in two decades; the second is a lot more difficult to swallow, especially since more goods, like petroleum products, new automobiles and sugar-flavored drinks, will be slapped with more taxes.
I have no doubt in my mind that TRAIN is a needful piece of tax legislation that only a strong leader like Duterte can dare implement. But the government, especially Malacanañg Palace, can do a better job of easing the pain that comes with new taxes if it isn’t always being sidetracked by issues that do not have as direct an effect on the taxpayers.
This week, the first in which TRAIN would have gone into effect, Malacañang’s spokesman was still busy with non-essential stuff, like parrying questions about a so-called compromise deal with the Marcos family, the lack of fitness of United Nations special rapporteur Agnes Callamard and (most egregious of all) blind-item speculation on government officials who will reportedly soon be fired. As far as I could tell, from reading the newspapers, there was no all-important briefing on the effects of TRAIN for businessmen and wage workers alike, the people who are dying to know more about the new tax breaks and taxes.
My former colleague on this page, the current presidential spokesman Harry Roque, must take the blame for this. Roque, after all, runs the daily Palace media briefing—and all of the reactions of the palace to these aforementioned and ultimately unimportant issues lobbed at him by reporters came from his mouth.
I don’t understand why Roque would focus on these non-essential stories when there’s a huge TRAIN threatening—if you believe the government’s critics—to run us all over in the new year. But I have a suspicion that for the presidential spokesman, taxes are topics that are not “sexy” enough for Malacañang to expound upon.
Of course, it’s been long suspected that Roque agreed to leave his party-list congressman’s seat because what he really wants is to run for the Senate. And this gig as Duterte’s spokesman, by his supposed calculations, is going to get him there by raising his profile in the public’s and the media’s eye.
Like some observers of the Palace, I’ve also asked myself the question that must follow, if it is true that Roque is only using his position to get into the Senate: When is the presidential spokesman speaking for the President, and when is he really speaking for himself?
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I am sure that Duterte—if he was still speaking for himself like he used to do early on in his administration instead of trusting Roque to do that job for him —would probably want the people to know more about TRAIN. The President, after all, called the passage of the law that enabled his tax reform package one of the most important pieces of legislation that he approved so far.
These days, especially, when every sort of business wants to take advantage of TRAIN by jacking up prices and pointing (most unfairly) to the program as the culprit, Malacañang and its propaganda arm must decide if they want to divert the people’s attention with political bread and circuses or if they must counteract the efforts to sabotage TRAIN even before it leaves the station.
No one is going to be happy about paying more if the government fails to explain that the new impositions will actually lead to a better life, because funding for all Duterte’s infrastructure and other vital projects will now be secured. No one gladly pays higher taxes to begin with—but informing them about the good that the money they are handing over to the government would certainly go a long way toward easing TRAIN’s early journey.
By the way, Roque had to backtrack on his striptease about top officials about to be fired by Duterte yesterday, apparently upon receiving orders that the bloodbath wasn’t going to happen just yet. I’m still shaking my head because Roque found it of terrible importance to resort to showbiz-style blind item-mongering to begin with —and now he can’t even deliver on his plan to publicly declare the names that he promised to declare.
Roque may be many things and accomplished in a lot of them. But as a spokesman for the president, he still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing—to set the agenda for the media in order to push the government’s important programs.
Until Roque understands that he is Duterte’s mouthpiece, he will never really get it. And that is sure to make a lot of people—perhaps even Roque himself, in the future—really sad.
