From where I sit, blaming and tightening the screws on e-wallets, thinking that this is the right approach, is not going to solve the online gambling scourge.
HAPPY National Heroes Day to all the bayanis like me – the unsung heroes of our country (these days, the OFWs) whose daily toil far from home helps keep their families alive and the national economy afloat – as well as every Filipino named “Bayani”!
(As an aside on this last point, when I first met the late Marikina Mayor Bayani Fernando, I guessed right – he, like my father, was born into a non-Roman Catholic family, thus the non-Roman Catholic first name. And both the late mayor and my dad had to be “baptized” into the Roman Catholic Church to marry, both of them adding the very Catholic first name “Jose” to Bayani and thus ending up sharing the same baptismal name. As for me, I was born to a now-Catholic father who married into a “sarado-Catolico” family, so I was named Jose Bayani from the start. So there – useless trivia to start the week!)
If the title of this piece is puzzling, it’s because our policymakers seem to be approaching the second issue (online gambling) with the same scattershot policymaking they used to approach the first, which I think has been proven ineffectual.
Years ago, when I was the president of the Beverage Industry Association, I never got tired of arguing that the solution to the diabetes scourge in the Philippines is not to impose a tax on soft drinks (or CAS – carbonated spade drink), but to instead tax the consumption of rice. My reasoning was simple: based on our industry calculations of daily volume sold nationwide, every Filipino consumes a serving (one can) of soft drinks once every three days. And assuming the consumption is of the regular kind of CSD, then that’s about 350 calories added to the daily diet of the Filipino every three.
In contrast, Filipinos love rice – white rice to be exact. And each cup of rice has about the same calories as a can of regularly sweetened CSD. Now, how many cups of rice does the Filipino consume per day? Let’s assume that to be three, one per meal. This means that from rice alone over a span of three days, a Filipino ingests about 3,000 calories while adding 350 from a serving of CSD.
You and I know that the average Filipino consumes more than three cups of rice per day.
So I said, if the reason for taxing CSDs is to lower the risk of diabetes in the country, think again. Because even if you make CSDs more expensive for the consumer, the diabetes scourge will continue. Because it’s not sweetened soft drinks that’s the problem: it’s rice. Plus juices (which Pinoys think are “healthier!). And bread and pancit. Today, so many dialysis centers exist around the country because so many Filipinos are suffering from advanced stages of diabetes.
Now comes a new scourge – online gambling. Anyone with a semblance of tech savviness who navigates a smartphone, tablet or desktop daily is bound to come across adverts for this new form of “entertainment.” It’s even been legalized by Pagcor. And millions of Filipinos are being caught in the net of online gambling and suffering the consequences as a result. How are our policymakers reacting? Oh – they want to crack down on e-wallets like GCash and PayMaya and what have you because these e-wallets, we are being told, are the means by which Filipinos get drawn into the murky world of online gambling.
It’s like taxing CSDs all over again. It’s like throwing the baby with the bathwater. It’s like using a 12-inch shotgun to kill a fly. It’s like … you get my point. Online gambling doesn’t need e-wallets to thrive. But cracking down on e-wallets will hurt more Filipinos who use them but don’t do any online gambling at all (like me!).
Bottom line is this – whether it’s “responsible gaming” or gambling, whatever leads Filipinos to engage in this type of lifestyle – in any form of addictive “enterprise” – is rooted in one’s values, behavior, upbringing and culture. Solving it or lowering the risk or propensity of one to engage in such activity requires a bigger picture approach that is not helped by scattershot, shotgun-like reactions that do more harm and end up not achieving the objective of assessing the issue effectively.
From where I sit, blaming and tightening the screws on e-wallets, thinking that this is the right approach, is not going to solve the online gambling scourge.
Who wants to bet on this?
