My Thoughts on PGMA's State of the Nation Address: POVERTY

Since I did not have the time to watch Gloria’s SONA last monday, I opted to print it. Gee, it was a quite long SONA – by the way it seems to the number of pages – 12 pages for me. I did have a hard time digesting it and now that I am trying to push it down in my brain, I think it is time for me to share my thoughts about it. Even La Kapitana wrote a long, long summary of it. Haha.

I observed the following in PGMA’s address:

• There are a lot of reported improvements in her SONA. She kept on mentioning about it.
• She used acronyms that I wasnt familiar with (I assume most people too) like EPIRA (what the heck is that?)
• And she blasted her critics in her SONA which shows that she is indeed mataray.

Now I will condense with all my might from what I have read from the SONA transcript that I printed.

On Poverty, she mentioned that:

Bumaba ang bilang ng nagsasabing mahihirap sila, mula 59% sa 47%. Kahit na lumaki ang ating populasyon, nabawasan ng dalawang milyon ang bilang ng mahihirap. GNP per capita rose from a Third World $967 to $2,051. Lumikha tayo ng walong milyong trabaho, an average of a million per year, much, much more than at any other time.

Now this is a surprise for me. People who are saying that they are poor decreased from 59 percent to 47 percent. And there are 8 million jobs created. I dont know where PGMA got her statistics. I may not be a statistician or economist but assuming that her data came from people saying na hindi na sila poor is subjective. This may not be objective numbers at all. Or maybe a product of a subjective survey?

Here’s what I got from NSCB:

Latest statistics released by the NSCB last 6 June 2006 indicates that approximately 24 out of 100 Pinoy families did not earn enough in 2003 to satisfy their basic food and non-food requirements. This was a slight improvement from the 2000 situation wherein 28 out of 100 families experienced income shortfall from the poverty threshold. The decrease by 3.1 percent in poverty incidence translated to a corresponding decrease by around 124,000 in the number of Pinoy families straining to make ends meet.  Annual per capita poverty threshold for the Philippines in 2003 stood at P12,309.

In terms of population, 30 out of 100 Filipinos in 2003 had income short of the minimum cost of satisfying the basic requirements, an improvement from 2000 in which 33 out of 100 Filipinos had income below the poverty threshold. This translated to a 1.6 million decrease in the magnitude of Filipinos living below the poverty line.

Hmmm…Here’s what I understand. PGMA stated that there is a decrease of people saying that they are poor – from 59 percent to 47 percent. That’s 12 percent decrease right? And then NSCB stated that there is a decrease indeed – from 28 out of 100 families who are in poverty in 2000 to 24 out of 100 in 2003 – so that’s minus 4 families. In terms of general population, there is a decrease too – from 33 out of 100 families whose income are below the threshold to 30 out of 100 in 2003. Again, that’s minus 3 families.

Translation = 1.6 million decrease.

According to her, there is a 2 million decrease. Di kaya ni-round off nya ang 1.6 million? Where’s the remaining 400,000 poor families?!

Pero 12 percent decrease?  I doubt that the 1.6 million decrease will account for the 12 percent decrease that PGMA stated in her SONA. In comparison to the general population of the Philippines which is projected at 92.23 million, the 1.6 million decrease may not account for the 12 percent increase. I mean the 12 percent decrease is a HUGE number but NSCB is saying what they are seeing from those numbers is only SLIGHT IMPROVEMENT.

I need help here. Do the math please.

Anyway, what she is saying that the 12 percent decrease is a BIG WOW, a big son of a gun, holy gamoly batman-where the heck she got her numbers?!?! Baka kaya sa Wikipedia nya nakuha? Hmmm.

Poverty, as I believed, is one tough social problem to crack. I think that because of the prevalence of poverty and changes in the economic climate, it became even tougher to solve. The Philippine government, on the other hand, have done efforts to raise people from beyond the poverty line but, again with the changes in the global economy and overpopulation, the solutions are not enough. They just turned into band-aid solutions. Ugh.

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Tags: gloria macapagal arroyo, PGMA, silver, SONA, State of the nation address 2009