Senators pass P6.3 trillion spending plan in record time, citing ‘math is a colonial construct’

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

The Budget, As Explained By the Budget

MANILA — The Philippine Senate approved the national budget this week after 47 minutes of debate, setting what historians from the entirely fictional Quezon City Institute for Legislative Studies are calling a new record for the fastest ratification of a document nobody has read.

The P6.3 trillion spending plan passed unanimously after the chairperson of the finance committee assured colleagues that the numbers had been checked by someone at some point, probably. Several senators noted that the budget contained line items for flood control infrastructure in municipalities where flooding had never occurred, on the grounds that this represented visionary forward planning.

Senator Rodrigo Baltazar Espiritu, who chairs the subcommittee on things that sound important, praised what he called the budget’s bold reimagining of arithmetic. We are not bound by traditional mathematical constraints, he told reporters. The Filipino people deserve creative accounting as much as any other people. He then announced he was late for a foundation event at his wife’s charity, which is headquartered in a building the government is currently renting from his wife’s charity.

Where the Money Goes, Theoretically

The budget allocates significant funds to infrastructure, education, health, and agricultural development — all sectors that have appeared in every Philippine national budget since independence and all sectors that continue to produce outcomes suggesting the funds are taking a scenic route to their destination.

The Department of Public Works and Highways received its customary appropriation for road projects, of which approximately 40 percent are expected to be completed, 35 percent to be started and then stopped pending a re-bidding process, and the remaining 25 percent to exist primarily as a set of PowerPoint slides that circulate at press conferences.

According to Dr. Marisol Reyes-Gutierrez of the fictional Philippine Center for Infrastructure Imagination, this represents an improvement over previous years, when some of the slides were not even properly formatted. This year they used better fonts, she noted. That is progress of a kind.

The Opposition Response

Opposition senators, who number enough to constitute a meaningful bloc but not enough to constitute a majority, expressed concern about specific line items before voting yes anyway on the grounds that withholding budget approval would hurt their constituents, which is both true and conveniently timed.

Civil society organizations have called for a full audit of budget utilization from the previous fiscal year, a request that has been made every year since 2003 and that the Commission on Audit processes with the thoroughness of an institution that knows its reports will be discussed at a press conference, praised for their candor, and then filed in a cabinet somewhere in Pasig City.

The budget now moves to the House of Representatives, where it will be refined, adjusted, realigned, and returned to the Senate in a form that technically resembles the original document in the way that a photocopy of a photocopy resembles its source: recognizable in outline, significantly degraded in resolution. Manila Bulletin will cover each step with the dedication of an organization that has been covering these steps since 1900 and has never once been surprised by the outcome.

In the meantime, Philippine Star reports that flood control funding has been reallocated to a committee studying whether flood control is the right approach to flooding, or whether flooding itself should be rebranded as a water feature.

The Cycle Continues

The Philippine budget process is, in its broadest outlines, a ritual of institutional hope — the annual affirmation that this year the numbers will add up, the projects will be completed, the funds will reach their intended destinations, and the arithmetic will cooperate with the outcomes. This hope is not irrational. It is the hope that sustains a government that must function regardless of whether it functions well. Civil servants who believe in their mandates file the reports. Auditors who believe in accountability write the findings. Journalists who believe in transparency publish the stories. And senators who believe in their constituents vote for budgets, because the alternative — admitting that the budget is more aspiration than plan — would require a honesty that no political system has yet managed to sustain for more than one press cycle. So the budget passes. The projects are announced. The funds are appropriated. And next year, with slightly different numbers and approximately the same outcomes, the cycle will begin again. The Filipino people, who are significantly more sophisticated about this cycle than their government gives them credit for, will watch, comment, and vote, and some things will improve, and some things will stay the same, and the budget will be submitted on time.

The Bigger Picture

Whatever the specific story — budgets that don’t balance, traffic that doesn’t move, workers who leave to support the families they cannot stay with, storms that arrive on schedule, athletes who unite a nation briefly, infrastructure that exists mainly on paper, journalists who ask the questions officials prefer not to answer, foods that carry a culture across oceans, faiths that survive the gap between their ideals and their institutions, vehicles that resist becoming something else — the Philippines is a country in conversation with itself about what it wants to be. This conversation is noisy, contentious, frequently hilarious, and genuinely important. It happens in barangay halls and Senate chambers, in press conferences and social media threads, in OFW group chats and Sunday homilies, in the jeepney that hasn’t been modernized yet and the one that has. The conversation is ongoing. It has been ongoing since 1898 at least and arguably since much earlier. It will continue. The outcomes are uncertain. The participation is not. Filipinos engage with their country’s problems with an energy and a creativity that the problems themselves have not yet exhausted. This, in the end, is what the news from Manila is really about, on any given week, beneath whatever the specific headline happens to be.

More satire: NewsThump | The Onion

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com