We are deep into the campaign season and with the election less than 45 days away, the candidates are continuing to use their most formidable weapon: “The Promise.” While mud-slinging of opponents and inflating their own past accomplishments are always necessary, offering the people “something more” is where the action lies.
No one really wants to believe, as Italian sculptor and painter Michelangelo said, “The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms.”
A candidate for mayor of Paris, France, in the 1930s promised to move the city to the countryside so that residents could enjoy fresher air. In 1970 a candidate in the US city of Aspen, Colorado, vowed to “rip up the city streets with jackhammers to force all transportation to be by foot or bicycle.”
We read in the platform of one presidential hopeful that “our plan also involves providing in-city or near-city high-rise housing for informal settlers.” Which “informal settler” or hardworking rank-and-file employee, for that matter, would not vote for the person who promises a high-rise housing unit presumably paid for or subsidized by the government?
Another candidate says the government, under a new administration, should “in education, organize all the classrooms, to ‘digital.’” While the specifics are lacking—as with all good political promises—visions of free laptops and tablets dance in the dreams of the voters and their children.
Mackenzie King, Canadian political leader and prime minister for 20 years from the 1920s through the 1940s, wrote, “The politician’s promises
of yesterday are the taxes of today.”
A friend of the BusinessMirror, Emmanuel “Doy” Santos is an economic-policy analyst based in Adelaide, South Australia, with degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master in Development Economics from the University of the Philippines. Santos makes the argument that candidates should be asked to provide the cost and, preferably, where the money will come from to pay for the promises. He writes that those aspiring to elected office should provide not promises, but “fully costed platforms to see if all proposals fit with revenue/deficit limits.”
In other words, and more bluntly, candidates should tell us how they intend to put our money where their mouth is.
There are approximately 4 million informal settlers in Metro Manila. How many will get new high-rise housing, and how much will it cost? There are approximately 6 million high-school students and 16 million primary students in the Philippines. Taking our students digital might cost between P50 billion and P200 billion. How does the presidential candidate intend to pay for that cost—increased taxes, shifting of funds in the current budget, or by borrowing the money?
Further, candidates can often act like a suitor trying to win his or her true love by raising the stakes of what they are offering. Santos: “I’m having a hard time just keeping track of what promises they’re making.”
But this is what political campaigns are all about, and for the electorate, in the words of a recent rock song, “Promises, promises, I’m enjoying the illusion.”