Who believed the no new taxes promise?

Attention 31-M+ BBM voters: Outgoing President Digong Duterte has telegraphed to his successor to increase taxes or create new ones – that will go against the President-elect’s emphatic campaign promise – to be able to pay the country’s record-high national debt that so far runs to more than P12 trillion (that’s a T).

The ginormous debt is attributed to government’s COVID response as well as Duterte’s Build-Build-Build projects.

A party-list congressman researched on this claim and discovered that “only 0.107 percent of the total borrowings of the government went to the COVID-19 response,” according to ACT-Teachers Rep. France Castro.

She cited an Ibon Foundation report in September 2021, which said only P570 billion out of P5.3-trillion borrowings were actually spent for COVID-19 response from 2020 to 2021.

She lamented that Duterte’s economic team somehow inflated the country’s debt, but still could not provide enough funds for aid and services.

Earlier, another congressman – Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman – raised a question how the incoming administration will fund its “Bayan Bangon Muli” stimulus program when Duterte already disbursed 90% of the 2022 budget even before the end of the first half of the year.

Answer: brace for impact – new and improved taxes coming our way.

During the campaign, rosy solutions were promised to avoid new taxes. Candidates also splurged on paraphernalia and allowances of campaign workers (including gas allowances for motorcycle riders), while public school teachers who went overtime during poll duty (due to defective Vote Counting Machines) must suffer tax deductions on their allowances.

Imagine learning that the Department of Finance wants the incoming secretary to defer implementation of income tax cuts scheduled for next year. That will hurt millions of ordinary Filipino workers who are just starting to recover from the months-long lockdown and loss of income.

Imagine also this: at the height of the pandemic, people learned to digitalize how they buy essentials, how to do banking, how to access entertainment. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas is vigorously advocating for total digitalization of banks’ operations.

Now, the government’s brilliant economic team wants to tax these digitalized services. Convenience must have a price.

All these cement the warning that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will still have to pay for the debts we incur today.

Still not afraid? Wait for the formal announcement of Digong as BBM’s anti-illegal drugs czar. As if red-tagging not just in media is going to scare us.

Be afraid… be very afraid.