President Duterte’s last budget request should “capture the urgency and the dimensions” of the national recovery that he laid out during his final State of the Nation Address Monday, Senator Sonny Angara said on Wednesday.
“The budget puts the money where the rhetoric is,” Angara said.
Angara said the plans Duterte spelled out in his speech should end up in the proposed 2022 national budget, which Malacañang will be sending to Congress soon.
Angara described the 2022 budget as “the major downpayment we will be making for our hard and long road to recovery.”
But the good thing is that the foundations for that recovery have been laid out “through laws and programs that promote economic growth with social equity,” Angara said.
“There’s free college to train our youth. There’s also the Universal Health Care. On the economic front, we are retooling the way we do business, encourage start-ups, retain talent and attract investments in order to create good paying jobs for our people.”
Angara said reform laws advocated by President Duterte and his predecessors “are the scaffoldings that hold our nation together in times of crisis and the same ones we will use in climbing out of the pandemic we are in.”
But he said things should be done as fast as possible “because the window to make the turnaround won’t stay open for long.”