Duterte’s last fiscal plan hit anew

(FILE) Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson (Joseph Vidal/Senate PRIB)

MANILA, Philippines —Borrowing more than the government can spend is not sound fiscal policy, Sen. Panfilo Lacson said on Wednesday as he ratcheted up his attack on the Duterte administration’s failure to spend the funds they asked Congress to allocate.

The senator, the first politician to confirm running for president in 2022, noted that based on the Department of Budget and Management’s own data on its website, the Philippines’ yearly borrowings from 2017 to 2019 averaged almost P1 trillion.

“What I am puzzled about is that while we were borrowing P1 trillion, our unused appropriations reached P331 billion,” Lacson told the “Kapihan sa Manila Bay” online forum. “Isn’t that an unsound fiscal policy?”

For example, according to Lacson, it does not make any sense for a person who has P8,000 but needs P10,000 to borrow P5,000 when there’s interest involved.

“Why do we have to borrow money that we can’t use year in, year out?” he said.

Lacson said underspending was a perennial bad habit even in earlier administrations.

“As early as 2007, did you know that the annual unused appropriations would reach P400 billion?” he lamented.

“What we should look at and focus on is right spending, without wasting anything,” he said.

The senator said prudent spending was especially important considering the problem of “leakage.”

“Leakage, as we know, is pretty big. Conservatively, 20 percent of the budget is lost to corruption. If everything is spent correctly, that will be a huge thing,” Lacson said.

Underspending

On Monday, the senator accused the government of underspending as much as P63 billion under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act, or Bayanihan 2, saying some P46.397 billion was undisbursed and P17.273 billion unobligated after the law expired on June 30.

At the same time, the government urged Congress to pass a P5-trillion budget for 2022 even as senators scored the lack of specifics in President Duterte’s State of the Nation Address.

Sen. Juan Edgardo Angara, chair of the Senate finance committee, said Mr. Duterte’s last budget request should “capture the urgency and the dimensions” of the national recovery from the pandemic.

The 2022 budget, according to the senator, is “the major downpayment we will be making for our hard and long road to recovery.”

But Angara called for haste amid the persisting COVID-19 threat “because the window to make the turnaround won’t stay open for long.”

“I think everything we do from hereon — vaccinating our people, spending the budget, safely reopening our schools, building infrastructure — should be done at warp speed,” he said.

Angara reiterated his earlier statement that the Duterte administration had succeeded in building the country’s foundations for recovery “through laws and programs that promote economic growth with social equity.”