loria Arroyo, in
her latest flight of fancy, told an investment forum in Hong Kong that what she
describes as political noise will have no affect on her economic reforms. Will
not? Wrong tense.
The credibility of her administration has already sunk so
low, resulting in a widely held perception among academics and businessmen, both
local and foreign, that the achievements she has been touting are more the
products of cooking the books than actual expansion of output.
There are those who refuse to think the unthinkable, that the
statistical agencies have become adjuncts of the Palace’s propaganda machine.
But these people, even as they accept the claims of sustained growth, now
seriously question whether such kind of growth is welcome or desirable. The
proportion and absolute number of people living in poverty is growing larger.
This is mainly because of the slow rate of job creation (placed by some
economists at 150,000 last year against Gloria’s claim of one million). Of what
use is growth, these people ask, which benefits only a few, mostly the thieves
and the corrupt?
We used to hail Gloria, to the befuddlement of our long-time
readers who knew us as inveterate critics of government, for addressing the
chronic budgetary deficit that threatened to throw the government into a fiscal
crisis some years back. We knew the value added taxes would hurt. We knew that
raising power rates and the prices of other subsidized products and services
would hit low-income households most.
But we were seduced by visions of the future benefits of
fiscal stability and market reforms.
We went along with this approach in the belief that in the
long run everybody would benefit. What we failed to take into account was that
the money extracted by the state would end up in the pockets of the
well-connected and the powerful.
Now, the house of cards is in danger of collapsing under the
weight of inadequate food supply, rising oil prices, a global credit crunch and
a faltering US economy which remains the locomotive of the world economy.
These are formidable challenges even in politically stable
times. How can we deal with them under a leadership which is no longer morally
fit to govern?
Gloria’s listeners in Hong Kong were polite. But they surely must be
wondering why they were listening to one whom her countrymen universally see as
a congenital liar.
