Hue and cry
| SHE SAYS |
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| Dinah S. Ventura |
Last week saw a horde of students from State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) gathered and holding up signs and placards bearing pithy phrases directed at President Noynoy Aquino. It looked and sounded like we were back to Gloria days, but this time the students were setting fire to roughly hewn images of Ninoy’s son.
The students were all heated up about the news of budget cuts allegedly to be made on state universities by 2011. Later, however, a very perplexed Sen. Franklin Drilon wondered on television why there was such a fuss when, in fact, he said that the budget for SUCs had been increased!
Was there a mistake? Who was mistaken?
Senator Drilon, who is chairman of the Senate finance committee currently deliberating the proposed P1.645 trillion national budget, explained in a report that appears in the Diliman Diary blog that the allotment for SUCs in the 2010 budget “was loaded with congressional insertions” that were not actually released because “there were no additional revenues.”
He clarified that when the 2010 budget was approved, these “congressional insertions” upped the total budget of SUCs to P22.4.
He said: “For the record, we did not remove anything. What happened is that in the 2010 budget, embedded in that budget are congressional insertions... to the amount of over P2.8 billion.”.... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101201com5.html
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