Agenda One News, Part 8

Last Monday, October 17, veteran TV host Cito Beltran interviewed me again in his daily, Monday-Friday 8-9am tv program, "Agenda" in One News, Cignal TV, https://www.facebook.com/ONENewsPH. 

Cito is also a columnist in Philippine Star, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, https://www.philstar.com/authors/1804831/cito-beltran.

Two topics supposedly he would ask me -- about banks on GFANZ (Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) and the Philippine economy.

But during the staff intro about me (thanks, Jhoanna), Cito was intrigued again by my think tank, Minimal Government Thinkers (MGT. That's where he asked me several questions about the philosophy and advocacies of the group.

I said that MGT is a think tank advocating minimal government, small limited government that require less taxes, less interventions. A government limited in primary function to protect the people's three basic rights -- right to life (vs violence, murder,...), right to private property (vs thieves, arsonists,...) and right to liberty (vs bullies, dictatorship,...).  That we need to remind people to assume more personal and parental responsibility and not assume that many things should be government responsibility, including their children's healthcare, education, etc. Because a government that's big enough to give everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have. Cito liked this, repeated and emphasized this.

Going to the Philippine economy and MGT advocacies, I said that we need to cut spending, cut borrowings and cut taxes. Our outstanding public debt rose from P8.22 trillion in 2019 to about P12.15 in 2021, P13.4 trillion as of August 2022, our interest payment alone about P360 billion in 2020, P380 billion in 2021, and projected to reach P500 billion this year. Interest payment alone, principal amortization not included yet.

Then we went into infrastructure spending, Cito also believes that big conglomerates here have the resources and engineering capacity to undertake many huge infra. I added that we should indeed move away from "all taxpayers pay" to "only users pay" scheme in many infra projects.

Two things that the national government can do to avoid huge taxation of the people due to our huge public debt: reduce spending by the national government as local governments have more money under the Mandanas ruling, and have large-scale privatization of government assets and corporations.

Parting words, I reiterated that we should go back to people assuming more personal and parental responsibility and have less government responsibility in running our own lives. Stick to the rule of law, from small things like traffic rules where ordinary motorists are easily penalized while red plates (government) and those with govt connections can park in No Parking areas, violate or be exempted from car-prohibition (coding) days, etc.

The interview lasted for 30 minutes, see here starting from 28 minutes mark, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMiTWpjIfvU. 

Many thanks again, Cito.
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See also:
Agenda One News, Part 5, July 28, 2020
Agenda One News, Part 6, August 31, 2020
Agenda One News, Part 7, February 07, 2022.