INSIDER VIEW: Of candidates and promises, promises

A few weeks ago, a parade of strange and stranger beings trooped to the designated sites for filing certificates of candidacy for local and national positions to be contested in May 2025.

For the most part, it’s like we were looking at an open call audition for a national comedy of errors as so many of the would-be candidates flaunt their wealth of ignorance but still aspiring to become local chief executives, congress people, senators even.

As voters, we can only sometimes shake our heads and be amused by this variety show which impinges on the national consciousness every three years. However, as discerning voters, and I am hoping that many of us still are, what should we look for among the earnest individuals ready to do almost anything (not just a song and dance) to get our votes?

Empty promises

From a fiscal perspective, these candidates should at least understand how a national budget is prepared, and for that they should at least understand basic arithmetic. 

For example, candidates often promise tax cuts or tax exemptions, while vowing to put more funds for social programs.  Somewhere somehow sometime soon, the internal logic of the promise must come into sync. 

I am not saying that tax cuts are not always necessary, but to make this consistent with the promise of more funds for education for example, the candidate must articulate whether he or she envisions replacement tax hikes or new taxes or is just merely content to expand the deficit and incur additional borrowings.

Of course, another option is keeping the income tax cuts, not replacing them with new tax measures, increase the funds for education, but cut spending somewhere else. The tricky part now becomes, what and where are the cuts going to be.

We voters should then be wary of the candidate who is so generous in promises of assistance or projects, all with an eye toward the elections of 2025 and wanting to please all and sundry but with no hint of how these promises are going to be funded. In Tagalog the term for that is papogi lang.

Nation-building: A shared task

In time, voters and taxpayers will hopefully come to realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that good public investment projects can be conceived and born by not just one administration or one set of political leaders. 

Good projects can take years to formulate and implement. In the same manner, project implementation can drag when it becomes subject to more than critical review with a change in administration. 

I can still see a future when we will have leaders who have the courage to be honest to voters with their promises, be fiscally responsible, and also have the confidence and the self-assurance to allow projects started by predecessors to continue as is. 

So when giving credit, we citizens and voters should not be parsimonious and selective because nation-building is not really a one-person task and public services and projects are funded by taxpayer money.

We all need to mature. Credit sharing is a good thing. There is credit in planning a project, there is credit in pushing the project so it can be implemented, and finally there is credit in ensuring it is finished on time and with quality. 

Again, nation-building is not the work of one person alone. So as a voter, scrutinize that parade of wannabe political leaders and be more scrupulous in shading the ballot in May 2025.