CONGRESS received a well-deserved citation from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. during the signing in Malacañang last Wednesday of the General Appropriations Act (GAA) or the national budget for 2024. After all, both the House of Representatives and the Senate were able to deliver on the promise that the approved spending bill would be ready for signing before Christmas. This means that unlike in previous years, the national government will no longer use a reenacted budget at the beginning of the year.
The GAA 2024 provides an overall government spending worth P5.768 trillion, an amount that reminds us how the bureaucracy has grown through the years. The Palace reported that this budget is 9.5 percent higher than last year’s, and had noticeable increases in allocations for national defense and peace and order.
It should interest most Filipinos to know how the President perceives that spending law. He described the 2024 national budget as a representation of the government’s “renewal of our annual social contract with taxpayers that what they have paid faithfully will be rebated to them in full.”
“… we hope the top government officials who composed his Palace audience last Wednesday, and thousands more in various government offices, are listening.’
Marcos added the budget will focus on “fighting poverty and combating illiteracy, in producing food and ending hunger, in protecting our homes and securing our border, treating the sick, keeping our people healthy, creating jobs, and funding livelihoods.”
In his remarks, Marcos said “it is wrong to say that the budget merely pays for the overhead of the bureaucracy. It is more than that; it funds the elimination of problems that we as a nation must overcome.”
He also said the 2024 budget includes the means to “boost both the physical and the human capital of the nation” but in the same breath, he conceded that the spending law will not be able to fully fund all the government’s plans for the nation. In other words, full implementation of the budget depends on whether the government can earn enough revenues to fund the spending plan. Marcos also expressed his wish that government revenues would be unlimited, which is impossible to happen.
“Like any government, we are curtailed by what we can collect, by what our tax coffers convey. We can be reckless, take the easy path, borrow, let our children pick today’s tab up tomorrow. But that’s not the kind of inheritance we want to leave those who will come after us,” he added.
While Marcos was discounting the idea of incurring more loans to fund the budget, the Bureau of Treasury on the same day announced that the national government plans to borrow P585 billion from the domestic market in the first quarter of next year to address the budget deficit. All in all, the Marcos administration plans to borrow a total of P2.46 trillion in 2024 to help fund the P5.768-trillion expenditure program, with an expected budget deficit of P1.395 trillion.
Now that we have a budget – and the President risked being repetitive in saying that these funds are from taxpayer’s money – the other important concern is to ensure that the budget is spent for its intended purpose, and that corruption in projects and programs would be lessened, if not totally scrapped.
“Good governance dictates the duty to spend the appropriations we have cobbled together for the correct purposes, the right way, on time and on budget,” Marcos said, and we hope the top government officials who composed his Palace audience last Wednesday, and thousands more in various government offices, are listening.
