By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
August 22, 2018

The budgetary deficit under the tyrannical US-Duterte regime has widened in a big way and will further widen. The regime reduces the allocations for health and other social services but knows no limits for allocating funds for the office of the president, the pork barrel of the legislators, the military and the police. Bureaucratic corruption is rampant.

The debt service on the US dollar-denominated foreign loans will grow by leaps and bounds because the US is now raising the interest faster rate than before. While the debt service burden on the accumulated foreign debt is becoming heavier, Duterte is stupidly aiming to get more onerous loans from China for infrastructure projects.

The foreign monopoly and big comprador corporations and the wealthy enjoy tax cuts and tax loopholes under the neoliberal notion that they must have more capital to create jobs in a semifeudal economy that they themselves keep underdeveloped for easier plunder. Duterte, his family and cronies are also engaged in large-scale smuggling of drugs, rice, vehicles and other goods.

So, who pays for the tax that must be collected in greater amount because of the widening deficit? It is the toiling masses of workers and peasants and the middle social strata who must pay for the excise taxes already embedded in the prices of the basic goods and services that they must buy. And yet the tax revenues will not be enough, even if buttressed by the remittances of the OFWs. More foreign loans are needed at the currently rising interest rate in order to service the previous debt.

The Duterte dynasty and its fellow crooks in the Marcos-Arroyo-Duterte alliance or gang think they own the Philippines forever and that they can continue to oppress and exploit the people without end. But certainly from month to month, they shall become more discredited, isolated and hated as the people´s tax burden becomes heavier, the prices of basic goods and services soar and the human rights violations become more bloody and deadly. The people will certainly resist until these monsters are ousted from power.

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2019 Duterte Budget: DND, DILG and DPWH get sharp increases! Social services take crumbs!