IF you are a subscriber to The Manila Times’ digital edition – and you are, if you know what’s good for you – you likely receive an email once a week that provides a recap of the top Opinion pieces of the week. The list, usually 8-10 entries, is based on Google Analytics data, so it’s a straight popularity contest of what drew the biggest numbers of online readers during the week. I assume the list is ranked, but it doesn’t actually say that, so I’m not sure.
Even though I do not chase “clicks” or audience numbers, I am not so dead inside that I do not look at the recap hoping to see one of my pieces, and I usually do. Of course, I try to remind myself that is as much a matter of probabilities as it is attention-grabbing attributes; I produce more in the Opinion section in a week than anyone else in the entire operation, so I automatically have a much better chance of having something stick. From my point of view, the value of the list is as a guide to what the public, or at least that part of it who reads our paper, is thinking about at the moment. Not that I will necessarily cater to that – I chase topics, not sentiments, and a lot of what attracts public attention is stupid, because people – but it does give me some clues as to how I might hone my delivery.
For this week, there was only one thing I’d written on the list, which was The Manila Times’ Editorial for Saturday, March 28. Let me pull back the curtain for a moment and explain how that works.
As every newspaper does, The Manila Times provides an Editorial commentary everyday expressing the opinion of the organization on a topic of interest. At our paper, this commentary is a contribution of the Editorial Board, of which I am a member; there are about 10 of us, senior editors and company executives. The editorials themselves are written by four of us; I write three of them per week, one of our other senior editors writes two per week, and the other two write one each. The imbalance is due to the fact that the rest of them have the intense work of day-to-day newsroom editorial and management duties, and I do not. I am the princess of the organization, and do other things.
In terms of the basic topics and positions thereon, those originate with the authors of the editorials, and of course the resulting compositions reflect our individual styles. However, in order to make these commentaries the “voice of The Manila Times,” the proposed submissions are shared with the rest of the Editorial Board ahead of time (we have a super-secret Viber group for this), and need a thumbs-up before submission. Once in a while someone will raise a question or a point to add, but not very often; we have similar perspectives on most issues, and each of us tend to stick to subjects we are confident discussing. And, although I can’t speak for the others, I think there’s an unspoken convention that we avoid positions on issues that might be contentious within our little group. I certainly do, although again, that’s not something I have to think about very often.
Thus, despite the impression that some of our critics have when they label The Manila Times as “pro-administration,” or “center-right,” we do not have a predetermined or defined editorial policy, but rather an organic one. We call things as we see them, and if we develop certain strongly consistent positions as a result of that, it must be because we are right. Go to sleep knowing.
From a personal perspective, even though writing editorials is a difficult part of my job, particularly because of the frequency I have to maintain, it is one of the parts I enjoy the most. With my column, I can be myself, but with the editorials, I have to put myself on another level intellectually and ask myself the question, “what would I think of this issue if I were not me?” Besides that, it demands a somewhat different approach to composition, and I find that to be good exercise.
It has come to my attention that this editorial attracted more than the usual amount of attention because it pissed a lot of people off. I take more satisfaction in that than I probably should, but I also think it’s important to challenge this society’s overweening deference to authority, so if you’re one of the people who was made uncomfortable by it, good. Try listening to what’s actually being said rather than who’s saying it, for a change.
Populism is not an economic argument
NOTED economist and former National Economic Development Authority (Neda) secretary Solita “Winnie” Monsod has had harsh words for the government’s apparent plan to suspend fuel excise taxes to mitigate high costs resulting from the Iran war. Suspending the tax, Monsod said in an interview earlier this week, would be “stupid” and “kagaguhan” (foolish), because it benefits rich as well as poor Filipinos. As an alternative, Monsod is pushing for the imposition of a wealth tax on the richest Filipinos, which would help to fund direct cash assistance to the poor.
As capable as Winnie Monsod is as an economist, her judgment is clouded by populism and a bit of class prejudice; an irony, as some social media users have pointed out, as she herself is perceived to be rather well-off. The suspension of the fuel excise tax is, as we have pointed out in previous commentary, somewhat problematic, but Monsod’s negative characterization of it is an exaggeration. The concept of a wealth tax, while a nice ideal, is even more problematic, and would be completely unworkable at this stage of the Philippines’ political and governance development.
In an interview with journalist Pinky Webb on the Bilyonaryo News Channel on Monday, Monsod said, “That (the excise tax suspension) is a stupid suggestion because that tax is an aggressive tax, the ones who get hurt most are the poor. When you suspend the excise tax on oil, you’re helping the rich also, ano bang kagaguhan yan (what kind of foolishness is that).”
Monsod’s alternative suggestion is to forego the suspension of the fuel excise tax – the implication being that it should not benefit a class of the population that Monsod deems undeserving – and instead impose a 3-percent “wealth tax” on Filipinos with a net worth of P3 billion or more. In her interview, she singled out the top 50 richest Filipinos, although in reality the group that would be covered by the P3-billion threshold would be quite a bit larger. The rationale behind this is that not cutting the fuel tax would preserve the government’s revenue from that – estimated to be about P136 billion for 2026 – and that combined with the revenues from the wealth tax could easily fund “targeted interventions” for the poor, such as “unconditional cash transfers” and other relief measures.
Taxes are usually described in economic terms as either progressive or regressive, so it is unclear what Monsod means by describing the fuel excise tax as “aggressive.” Taxes on spending, such as value-added tax, excise taxes, luxury taxes, and “sin” taxes, are always regressive, in the sense that a lower-income person will spend proportionally more of his income to purchase a given commodity than a higher-income person will. However, the fuel excise tax has only a mild regressive effect, because it is a flat per-unit rate; for example, P6 per liter for diesel fuel. The proportional benefit of suspending the tax is exactly the same whether one buys two liters of fuel or 200, and because lower-income customers tend to buy much less, the regressive effect is essentially canceled out.
Nevertheless, Monsod is correct in pointing out that the sacrifice of government revenue from the fuel tax suspension is not ideal. As we have previously noted, the positive effect is modest at best, and decreases as fuel prices increase, to the extent that a level would probably be reached where the benefit to consumers would be greatly outweighed by the cost of foregone tax revenues.
As for the wealth tax idea, that is a complete non-starter at this point. Most countries that have at some point implemented some form of wealth tax have later repealed them, having found them too difficult to administer and generating very low amounts of revenue for the government. A 2023 report by the OECD on wealth taxes noted that the number of OECD members with a wealth tax fell from 12 in 1990 to just four in 2017. Of three countries in Europe that still have wealth taxes of the sort proposed by Monsod – Spain, Switzerland, and Norway – the contribution of those taxes to overall government revenue collections is small; 4.3 percent of total tax collections in Switzerland, 1.5 percent in Norway, and 0.6 percent in Spain.
It goes without saying that all of these countries have much stronger and more efficient institutions than does the Philippines. Here, it would very likely cost the government more to administer the tax than it could make up in additional revenue, without extensive reform and strengthening of institutions and processes.