2010 budget approved by the House of Representatives
Posted on November 9th, 2009
The proposed P1.514-trillion national budget for 2010 by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was approved last night on the third and final reading by the House of Representatives who voted 175-6 in favor of the proposed budget.
House Speaker Prospero Nograles said the budget would now be sent to the Senate. “We hope to approve it before the end of the year. As I have promised, there will be no reelected budget during my watch,” he said.
The speaker has just returned from an official visit to the United States in time for the resumption of the session of Congress. Nograles, before announcing the votes, told his colleagues that the President signed on Nov. 3 Senate-House Joint Resolution 5. The resolution authorizes her to augment this year’s calamity fund by P12 billion. The additional P12 billion would be used for relief and rehabilitation in areas devastated by the recent onslaught of typhoons.
For his part, party-list group Abakada-Guro Rep. Jonathan Dela Cruz suggested that the bicameral conference committee on the measure recast it so that more funds would be allotted for the reconstruction of typhoon-ravaged communities. Dela Cruz voted in favor of the budget.
Dela Cruz added that the P50-billion reconstruction fund should be sourced from a “reworking” of credit terms with the country’s creditors. He said, “I believe that given the country’s present circumstance, we have a golden opportunity to seek relief from our creditors, foreign and local.”
Nueva Ecija Representative Edno Joson, however, lamented that despite the expenditure of hundreds of billions and now trillions in taxpayers’ money every year, “We are still in the clutches of mass poverty.” Joson was one of the six congressmen who voted against the 2010 budget.
“Our people literally hunger and thirst for government services, the most basic of which are food, shelter, health and education. For the past 50 years, government has failed to provide these most basic of services,” Joson said.
He added that the annual budget, as a tool for development, has not been put to good use. This is because the nation’s leaders have failed miserably in alleviating mass poverty and have succeeded only in enriching themselves, “We have only ourselves to blame,” he said.
