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We weren’t born yesterday EDITORIAL 10/11/2010

Monday, October 11, 2010

We weren’t born yesterday

EDITORIAL
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10/11/2010
Does Speaker Sonny Belmonte honestly believe the public will buy his explanation that the additional P50 million allocation from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) he and members of the House bartered with the Palace to settle a budget dispute, which he claims will be farmed out without congressional intervention, justify this as not being pork?

The amount was wrangled from Budget Secretary Butch Abad who is supposedly on zero budgeting which is not compatible with the automatic appropriation. Multiply P50 million by just 200 congressmen, since party-list House members were not included in the appropriation, and that’s P10 billion in projects that the DPWH will be required to apportion “without congressional intervention.”

That’s aside from the P25 million each congressman will be getting from the proceeds of the Road User’s Tax (RUT) that Belmonte should have been reminded that senators are already working to send directly to the national treasury instead of these road funds being used as source of political petty cash.

Belmonte in so many words had said House members will not have anything to do with projects to be funded from the additional P50 million from DPWH which was totally incongruent with the reason the argument with the Palace over pork barrel or the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) started anyway..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101011com1.html

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