National Budget for 2025: more than a zero-sum game
The Philippines’ P6.3 trillion national budget for 2025 may not succeed in delivering on the lofty social goals enunciated by President Marcos in his July 2024 State of the Nation Address for 2025. The allocations involving some realignment disfavored the priority sectors of education, health and other social goals. These budget politics in the Philippines are no less than a zero-sum game because in maintaining the favorite items of legislators for public works projects, there can only be so much left allocated to education, health and other key social amelioration projects, even to the extent of transgressing the Constitution and the laws of the land. Beyond this game, the statistics on poverty, quality of education and health, income inequality and fiscal sustainability would have nowhere to go but south.
In keeping the fundamental allocations and priorities of the original version of the national budget bill, the President seems to have failed to address society's call for him to “reconvene the bicameral conference committee" and correct those “glaring anomalies” in the budget. Based on reports in social media, some mass actions are being organized to oppose the national budget and to demand good governance, something that apparently was not manifest in the budget legislation.
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