Recently a bill came out of the Philippine Congress granting a P2,000 increase in retirees’ social security pensions. President Benigno Aquino III vetoed it, angering the retirees.
The pensioners are restive. But it was Mr. Aquino’s legislative allies who let him down in the pension mess. His non-allies put him in a tight spot, intentionally surely.
Any legislation that entails funding requires a source of the money that will pay for what the law wants to implement.
If you want to build a bridge or road, the law must specify where the funds to build such will come from. If you want to build schools, it’s the same. And so on and so forth.
Thus, the SSS additional pension bill passed by the Congress should have specified where the money to pay for the additional P2,000 a month would come from.
The authors of the pension increase bill should have made sure there was money to fund the increase that they wanted SSS pensioners to receive each month. Did they do that?
Apparently not, because now there’s a controversy over where the foreseen additional pension would have been sourced.
The additional pension would have cost P56 billion a year. But the SSS only earns between P30 billion and P40 billion a year. It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that the SSS itself wouldn’t have enough funds to finance the pension hike. It would go bankrupt if it was forced to pay out the pension. Why didn’t the bill’s authors do the simple arithmetic?
And now, after the President’s veto of the bill, Cynthia Villar, the author/sponsor in the Senate, says she’s amenable to a P500 or P1,000 dagdag-pension.
Why didn’t she say that before getting the bill voted on in the Senate? Because, apparently, she didn’t do her homework. Because if she had done the math, she would have known that what she wanted for the pensioners would need additional funding from sources other than the SSS alone.
What about the sponsor(s) in the House?
They’ve done the pensioners a disservice. Forget about putting Aquino in a bad light, they do that all the time to him so that’s par for the course.
They forced the bill through the legislative mill without checking if there was money to pay for what it would be mandating. They forced the bill through to embarrass Aquino. Now they’ve succeeded in making the pensioners angry.
Who doesn’t want pensioners to have more money to pay for their medicines, basic needs like food, etcetera.
We all do. But how do you give it to them when there’s not enough money available?
What the bill’s sponsors in the House intended was to either force Aquino to sign the law or to make the pensioners angry with him.
His allies, both in the House and the Senate, didn’t protect Aquino. Villar is described in the press as an administration ally. With allies like that, who needs enemies?
And now, Villar is putting the President in an even worse situation as she makes noises about a compromise smaller amount, making herself look good and Aquino look bad.
They all put Aquino in a tight spot, the increased pension’s authors, his allies, and even his own staff charged with legislative liaison for not making sure an affordable amount was passed instead of the P2,000 a month that the SSS can’t afford to fund.
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