Can I have some of my salary back?

Last April 15, Filipinos had to fulfill the most important obligation of every citizen to his/her country -- to pay taxes.

And like every good Filipino, yours truly also pays his taxes. Since I'm an employee, the company I'm working for deducts the approrpiate amount which I'm supposed to give to the government from my salary, and they take care of the rest.

A few days ago, my company sent me a piece of paper stating my Income Tax Return. I didn’t pay much attention to said document then because I was too occupied with work and side gigs. It was only now that I decided to take a look at it, only to realize that after a year’s worth of work, I gave up a hefty sum of money to the government. T_T

Php 45,000 to 65,000 is easy to scoff at if your last name is Zobel de Ayala, Cojuangco, Lopez, Singson or Sy. And even people from those families won't squander such amount for nothing. So how is a middle class salaryman like me supposed to react when he finds out that he just gave 45,000 to 65,000 to the government, without even being asked if he liked to give that much? You bet I’m pissed.

Let's face it. Nobody likes paying taxes. But at the end of the day, if we want to have a working government, we need to pay for it. Where else is the government going to get money to pay for the salaries of the police officers, public school teachers, public hospital doctors and nurses, and other civil servants? The thing is, I'm not getting what I paid for.

In a time where almost every good/commodity is getting expensive by the minute, you'd think the government would think of a way to help its citizens overcome all these economic problems. But on the contraire, they apathetically watch as the Big Three, Meralco, NLEX, SLEX, continue to bully us. This, plus we have to worry about taxes.

Now, said companies can throw the MRT/LRT card at me and say that because the cost of everything has gone up, ergo, so must we. But I can't believe the government can't do anything about it. Oh wait, they can. They just asked us to pay taxes last April 15.

The P-Noy administration is keen on collecting taxes because the last administration didn't bother leaving any loose change behind. Fair enough. But with the all inflation phenomenon going on, I don't see why the masses should continuously shoulder much of the burden.

What about pork barrel? Well, what about it?

A huge chunk of the government's funds -- our taxes, which makes it your money and mine -- go to pork barrel. Each of our legislators, from the combined 286 congressmen/women from the House of Representatives to the 24 senators, receives pork barrel. Pork barrel, as defined by Wikipedia, is a derogatory term referring to appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to bring money to a representative's district. Derogatory...strong stuff right there.

Pork barrel is funding for government projects that will benefit a particular area only, but its costs are shouldered by all taxpayers. In other words, a citizen in Davao City has a hand in any project a Quezon City congressman is working on. Think of it as revenue sharing like in the NFL, wherein, even teams that don't sell a lot of tickets get some share from the income of more popular NFL teams. But while revenue sharing is good for professional sports leagues, it's not as good as an idea in terms of tax-shouldering duties. As David Stern puts it, it sounds commie.

Kidding aside, as it stands, each legislator receives about Php 72.5 million worth of pork barrel. And that's excluding their Congressional Initiative Allocations (which equates to some 15 million and up). Now, some cities and provinces are better off than others. Take Metro Manila for example, where the seat of government is located, and is the political, economic, social, cultural and educational center of the country. With those in mind, it follows that the National Capital Region is abundant in resources and has easy access to a wide array of government services. If that’s the case, then shouldn’t legislators here get less pork barrel than those who are in charge of overseeing more problematic places?

While pork barrel is intended for government programs, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what most politicians do with it – they keep it to themselves. Thus, political candidates will throw their values out of the window, all in the name of being seated in power and the chance to get a bite out of the pig. Regardless of the condition of a town, city, municipality or province – whatever you want to call it – the masses seldom benefit from pork barrel, unless it’s campaign period and all the legislators suddenly launch several government programs at once, just so they could proudly say that they made good use of our money. OUR MONEY.

In light of this matter, I’ve come to a conclusion that the government should just abolish pork barrel.

P-Noy, time and time again, has said that his administration needs money. Cutting the pork should  give the government more money than it needs. Again, it’s 72.5M or more per legislator. That’s a whole lot of dough. Besides, a town/city/province/municipality already has a mayor to take care of things like building infrastructures and launching programs, so on and so forth. And if the mayor can’t get the job done, government agencies like the DSWD, DPWH, DILG, DepEd and DOH can always step in to resolve problems. So giving such funds to congressmen and senators is overkill, both for them and us.

If the pork barrel is abolished, the government gets the money it needs that it won’t need much of our contributions. I’m not saying that the government should stop collecting taxes. All I’m saying is, it shouldn’t be asking a lot when it has millions to give away to our legislators in the first place.

I have nothing against allocating funds for projects that were supposed to improve the living conditions of our people. But when I see 60-70 students cramped inside classrooms, several unfinished and bumpy roads, outdated equipment in public hospitals, scalawags in uniform, cranky civil servants, millions of under/unemployed, and just as many hungry people, I can’t help but think that we’re better off with  the money in our hands, instead of putting it in the hands of one politician that may or may not work (with the latter most likely happening) towards the betterment of his/her constituents’ lives. 

In addition, if the government were to reduce taxes, everything becomes cheaper. As I’ve said in Reclaiming EDSA…for the right reasons, since the major oil firms in the country are doing some tax evasion, one way or another, might as exempt them from paying it. This way, they have a very good reason to bring down the prices of gasoline and petroleum. And when this happens, everything from transportation fare, electric bills, water bills to food, becomes affordable. Also, with fewer taxes, we take home more money from our salaries, which we can use for things need and want.

In these trying times, we can’t sit around and wait for these politicians to make their move. If they can’t do anything good with our money, might as well have them return it to us. We need a quick fix from all the inflation going on. And abolishing the pork barrel is a win-win situation for everybody: The government has more money. The people has more money. And for the legislators, the value of  their assets, assuming it's what's left of the pork barrel they denied us, in a pork-barrel free and small tax economy, will also go up.

Anyway, their (legislators) primary responsibility is to pass laws. That’s what we pay them for. Why they have pork barrel, despite the presence of various local government units, mayors and baranggay captains, is still beyond me.

If Pres. Aquino is intent on living up to his promise of improving our lives and in eradicating corruption, then he should be in the forefront of the pork barrel’s abolishment. If he does, not only does he prove that he has the balls to make enemies for the sake of change, he also shows he is indeed the man for the job. However, if he doesn’t, based on his performance during the course of his tenure, I won’t be surprised.