Repost ABOLISH THE PORK BARREL SYSTEM NOW!!! from my brothers FB friend, Bernard Ong: Quick summary of life w/o pork in Q&A format: Q: Whats wrong with giving the president discretion over billions? A: The president may be dishonest, incompetent, or both. He may use pork as a way to bribe legislators to support his agenda. Presidents come & go, hence we need to take presidential pork away so that bad ones cant steal or abuse it. Q: Whats wrong with giving lawmakers discretion over funds? A: Their job is to enact laws, not pick pet projects. Discretion is prone to abuses like kickbacks, nepotism, cronyism, overspending, vote-buying. Q: Who will take care of local needs if lawmakers have no pork? A: Local govt units - under governors, mayors, barangay captains. Local arms of implementing agencies too. Q: What happens to services funded by pork? A: They will still be performed by agencies - like Dep-Ed or DOH. Hopefully agencies can do better job than politicians. Q: What happens to pork funds if abolished? Where will funds go? A: Funds that went to pork should be line-itemized, as part of general budget (GAA). Total funds remain the same. Its only discretion that disappears. Each line item has to be justified & compared vs other priorities given our limited budget. Q: What is line-item bugeting? What about discretionary budgeting? A: Heres a simple analogy. You give a child an allowance for school: P50 for transport, P100 for lunch, P50 for snacks & incidentals. Thats line-item budgeting. Give the child P200 & let him freely decide how to spend it - which could go to cigarettes, load & other non-essentials. Thats discretionary budgeting. Q: But what about emergencies & calamities? A: Many options. You can spend proactively in projects to mitigate or reduce risk. You can spend on improving disaster recovery capabilities of LGUs & agencies. You can ring-fence calamity funds in specific agencies. Or you can have centralized calamity fund that can only be used for calamity relief & recovery. If such fund falls short, congress can authorize extra funding. Q: Will corruption disappear w/o pork? No. But it will be easier to monitor budget spending when specific items are allocated to specific agencies. COA will find it easier to audit. Citizens & media will find it easier to track projects. Looters will be easier to catch & prosecute.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 02:00:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015