State of the Nation

I’m an economist by background so you can say that I understand the economic hullabaloos that you hear whenever it’s SONA time again. I just saw Gloria’s one hour SONA and I must say, figures show that even though we feel we have not improved these past year, well, we actually did.

As the one who does the budget in our household, I felt the rising prices more than my husband could. If before we can afford to keep our groceries at 1k per week, now we can’t. If before we can buy our gas at 600 pesos per tank, it shoot up to 650, and now 700! Not to mention our electricity and water bill…

I like Dr. Habito’s standpoint. As always, he explains it clearly. I used to think it’s just because I was his student at UPLB, but now, as a common housewife, I still can. He has argued that no matter what figures Gloria shows on her SONA, be it that we improved or not, it all boils down to three things – prices, jobs, and income.

Prices – prices are drivers of your money’s purchasing power. If prices are high, you can only buy this much. If they are low, then you’re lucky you have extra. Food, fuel, rice and other main commodities’ rapid increase in prices drove our inflation to 11.4% in June (or so I remember Gloria saying earlier). I remember buying 2kgs of rice for P50 in Feb, now, it can only buy me 1kg! Sigh.

Jobs – I know a lot of companies retrenching, especially BPOs. Whatever reason they give, they cannot hide that people lost jobs. In this time that call centres and BPOs have instability due to the worsening US economy, what consolation do Filipinos have? It has spared many of going abroad to be OFWs but is causing uncertainties in job security. Not to mention the ballooning number of working age Filipinos about to graduate or have graduated and are part of the unemployed statistics already.

Income – our gross domestic product slowed down to 5.2% from last year’s 7%. Okay, let me not expound on this one… Another sigh.

I agree with Sir Ciel, the true state of our nation lies in the quality of life we Filipinos live. Our ability to send our children to school, feed them healthy and nutritious food, afford hospitalization in times of sickness, all these are a mirror of what our true state of the nation is.

But no matter what statistics tell us, no matter what Gloria states in her speech, let these not hinder us and lose hope. In these times, all we need to do is to trust God and hope for the best. I know this is what we are doing.