‘We do not have to redistribute wealth. We have to provide the means for those who do not have wealth to create wealth for themselves.’
TWO headlines caught my eye in the first week of August.
The first was “PH economy expanded by 5.5% in Q2.”
The second was “Philippines’ 50 richest 2025: Collective wealth climbs 6% to $86 billion.”
I can’t recall how many times I’ve come across similar headlines in the past. I am sure this is not the first time.
What’s the point?
The fortunes of the richest 50 Filipino billionaires have been growing at a pace faster than the country’s gross domestic product.
Our GDP in 2024 was US$461.6 billion. The wealth of the richest 50 represents 18.65% of GDP.
The “poorest” among the 50 has a net worth of US$185 million or more than 10 billion in pesos, meaning we have maybe 50 or so more billionaires whose net worth is between P1 billion and P10 billion.
In peso terms, the wealth of the richest 50 amounts to P4.773 trillion—representing 75.45% of the P6.326 trillion budget of the national government for 2025. If we add the wealth of the other billionaires, the total could exceed the national budget.
Of course, it is not statistically correct to compare personal wealth with GDP or with the government budget.
I’m just doing it to drive home a point—the point being the great wealth divide that engulfs the nation, the million-light-years that separates the wealthy from the poor in our society.
In a song, Bamboo calls this condition “tatsulok.”
At the top of the “tatsulok” are 100 or so ultra-rich. At the bottom are some 17.54 million poor Filipinos, constituting 15.5% of the population as of 2023, who, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority, live below the poverty line. Based on the PSA poverty threshold of P13,873 a month for a family of five, they survive on a monthly budget of P2,775.
Of course, the poverty incidence has gone down by 2.6 percentage points from 18.1% in 2021. But when we factor in the growth in population, the numbers do not really matter much.
Which brings me to my next point. I have nothing against being wealthy or aspiring to be wealthy.
In fact, it should be our national goal to make every Filipino or every Filipino family wealthy.
But we cannot achieve that unless we change the way we view poverty.
Since time immemorial, we have viewed poverty as a condition to be eradicated (so we have poverty-eradication programs), or to be fought against (so we have anti-poverty agencies and anti-poverty programs), or to be alleviated (so we have poverty-alleviation programs such as 4Ps, Ayuda, Tupad). We even have a National Anti-Poverty Commission.
Maybe we have been attacking poverty with the wrong perspective and mindset. Maybe instead of being anti-poverty, instead of thinking about how to fight poverty, we should think about creating wealth.
Maybe, we should turn all these anti-poverty agencies and programs into one agency whose sole mission is to make every Filipino wealthy—a Pambansang Komisyon Para sa Pagpapayaman ng Bawat Pilipino—whose only task is to make programs that will empower the poor to create wealth for themselves and the nation.
We do not have to redistribute wealth. We have to provide the means for those who do not have wealth to create wealth for themselves.
That is the only way to eradicate poverty.
