Six-year term too short to make difference — Noy By Angie M. Rosales 06/28/2010

Too many problems inherited from Gloria Six-year term too short to make difference — Noy By Angie M. Rosales 06/28/2010 President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino admitted yesterday that his six-year administration may not make a major difference in Filipinos’ lives as he takes over as President on Wednesday of a nation with great expectations but saddled with a slew of problems, including worsening poverty, pervasive corruption, decades-long insurgencies, empty state coffers and crumbling infrastructure all inherited from nine years of misrule from President Arroyo. “You have to be humble to say you are not Superman and Einstein combined. You don’t have all the solutions at your fingertips from Wednesday,” he told reporters. And amid enormous expectation following nine years of rule under the deeply unpopular Gloria Arroyo, Aquino said his six-year term in office may well be too short to make a major difference. For starters, Sen. Edgardo Angara said new taxes as well as more foreign borrowings were inevitable under the incoming administration. “We cannot help but engage in new borrowings because our income from taxation is not enough. We have to make new loans to cover our deficit. What is important is that when you make new loans, it should really be spent for its purpose. You really need to expand, improve your economy,” he said. Angara, chairman of the Senate finance committee, said the Aquino administration may have no choice but to incur more borrowings to plug the estimated P349-billion record budget blowout this year. “There is what we call public borrowing program in the budget. It’s programmed in the budget. Same as the deficit program, we’re allowed to exceed P20 billion to P30 billion but that can easily be covered though borrowing and savings, when you step up collections of the Bureau of Internal Revenue(BIR) etc.,” he said. Aquino was swept to the presidency amid great hopes for change, but he was warned that not even Superman could fix the country’s many deep-rooted problems. Achieving a landslide win in last month’s elections was probably the easy part for the son of democracy heroine Corazon Aquino, according to Raul Fabella of the University of the Philippines School of Economics.... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20100628hed1.html

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