I find it so frustrating that our parents pay income tax and what remains of the money after tax is taxed yet again by the VAT. Which by the way is among the highest in Southeast Asia, and disproportionately affects people with lower income (as their income has to be spent more on consumption). Instead of doing anything that would justify the taxes our politicians are negligent and even outright corrupt. Just look at the current scandals and open secrets nowadays! The DepEd scandal, the Flood Control scandal, and it’s basically an open secret that BIR and Customs have shady shit going on…
And despite that, it is a common experience in public schools and universities that we have to “amot”. Basically every one of us have to raise money to fund something because apparently the school “”“didn’t have the budget”“” for it. Whether the school itself is corrupt or it’s because the school legitimately doesn’t have funds, it still points to the fact that our taxes are not properly implemented at all. And the poorer the school is, the more likely they have to amot. Isn’t this backwards? Instead of taxes being used as a distributive mechanism it’s being centralised…
The funny thing is (or maybe sad) is that when they reallocated the DPWH budget because of the flood control mess, they just transferred most of it to Philhealth who’s just as corrupt if not worse.
Which circles back to the argument about what makes capitalism bad. In the end, it’s the ones on top who gets to decide how the money is spent. It’s not automatically going to help the poor. It’s the same reason why I just facepalm hard when people would say we need nuclear power because our electricity is expensive. The only plus there is that we’d have less brownouts, but electric costs are going to be roughly the same.