No one bothers to tell it straight and to state the obvious — but President Arroyo who has made it a point to stress her academic credentials as an economist has failed miserably to save the Filipino people from economic ruin. Inflation continues to go up to the highest levels and the public are made to satisfy themselves with cosmetic solutions and selective dole-outs.

President Arroyo is just making palusot just to get by.

The economist Arroyo is hard-pressed right now to justify her presidency. She’s already an established fraudster and cheater. She was never elected to the presidency. Now, the hard-working economic president is losing all basis for her to claim national leadership. She cannot summon her economic know-how to untangle the Gordian knot that is the Philippine economic crisis that we all suffer from.

Take the rising oil prices, for example. The elementary arguments posited by the Arroyo government is that we can never escape from the price movements of world crude. But that’s imprecise — or just not right. There are factors that fall well within President Arroyo’s prerogatives and let us count them:

1. Removal of VAT on petroleum products — the bishops and the cause-oriented groups have made their point about this and it now falls on Arroyo to justify the continued imposition of this regressive tax.

2. Buy-back of Petron — A government-run Petron is a foil to profiteering by big foreign-owned companies.

3. Investigation into the transfer-pricing and over-pricing by petroleum companies led by Shell, Chevron-Caltex and Petron-Aramco — The Arroyo government must look into the books of these companies and report whether they are giving and charging prices commensurate to the world crude price movements, and whether we are being fleeced by transfer-pricing and over-pricing.

In addition, the Arroyo government has long refused to heed calls to establish a national centralized oil procurement policy that will ensure that we get oil from the cheapest possible choice at any one time and not be held hostage by the whims and caprices of the Big Three.

Inflation continues to rise and well all know it. But the most the government has done is to provide a one-time P500 voucher for what it describes as poor power consumers. But how about the entire nation, especially the many poor families who share one electric meter, the struggling middle class, and the smal and medium-scale businesses. We all deserve a reprieve, we all deserve immediate economic relief.

Instead of price controls on basic goods, all the Arroyo government has done is to provide a “price watch”  that uses outdated prices. Whatever prices their monitors take today will only be overtaken by inflation and may be unapplicable by tomorrow. And so we are all left alone to fend for ourselves. It as if we have no government mandated to protect our interests at this time.

Papatse-patse ang diskarte ni Gng. Arroyo. She doesn’t care about meaningful wage increases — only small, paltry ones that don’t make a dent in raising incomes of the poor. She doesn’t care about both public utility drivers and the commuting public. No oil price controls and no commensurate fare hikes, and no wage increases and no controls on basic goods as well.

A moratorium was declared on tuition fee hikes in state colleges and universities — never mind if a majority of college students are enrolled in private colleges and universities and barely a year after the University of the Philippines implemented the steepest fee hike that made its rates at par with the more expensive schools. The uniform policy was made non-mandatory, but no help was given to ensure that Filipino schoolchildren have the means to go and stay in school until they graduate.

There are also other things like the many other taxes that oppress the public especially during trying times such as now. The documentary stamp tax on OFW remittances is one of them. There is also the fact that the law Arroyo recently signed giving tax exemptions to minimum-wage earners didn’t have a retroactive effect!

And so we must all take a step back, reflect and reconsider the unwitting support given to the Arroyo government. We definitely deserve more than this.