Famous Filipino singer Lea Salonga recently issued a sensible take on the anger Filipinos supposedly feel about high inflation rates being reported nowadays. This opinion was cited in an Inquirer report…
“You gotta wonder, we’re angry about this, we have to see if it’s happened in previous administrations before and if we got angry then, too. And if it happened before and you didn’t get angry, you might have to examine why that is.”
Not surprisingly, the response coming from Yellowtards was typical — quick to slap a partisan label on Salonga’s response rather than apply a bit of brain to understanding what she was actually saying.
This sort of primitive thinking applied to what is an otherwise sensible opinion on the subject was exemplified in a tweet quoted in that report coming from prominent Yellowtard social media personality Francis Baraan IV…
Dear @MsLeaSalonga,
Is this a thinly veiled support for Marcos & Duterte? Aquino admin is the past.
THE PRESSING ISSUE TODAY IS THE CURRENT INFLATION RATE UNDER CURRENT ADMIN.
Whether or not we inflation rate was high during Aquino time, is now totally immaterial & irrelevant.
This despite much evidence that the inflation rate besetting the Philippine economy today is an outcome of many factors. This was highlighted in a previous Inquirer editorial Global Headwinds…
It’s true that the government had been trying to reverse the path of inflation back to the original target of 2-4 percent for 2018. However, events beyond its control — the typhoon’s damage to agricultural crops, for instance — made it more difficult to bring down prices.
The article went on to describe the most sensible approach to combatting inflation…
Economists expect the impact of monetary measures being undertaken by the BSP (mainly raising interest rates to curb consumption by discouraging people to borrow and spend these on cars and other consumer items), and nonmonetary measures such as lifting restrictions on the importation of rice and other food items, to begin showing results by 2019 yet.
Indeed, this is consistent to what I proposed in my article The REAL solution to inflation lies in the rich and middle classes curbing NON-ESSENTIAL spending where I wrote…
If a large enough number of rich and upper middle class people do this, they could potentially exert downward pressure on prices. Eat less rice and prices of rice go down. Drive less and consume less fuel and they can bring fuel retailers to their knees. Turn off their air-conditioners and the grid will be awash with excess capacity. Buy less $200 sneakers, and less foreign currency will be horded by retail barons to pay for container-loads of products that are irrelevant to the poor.
So you see, the Yellowtards don’t really know anything about inflation. Or anything about economics for that matter. It is best that their quaint views on the subject be ignored.
Webmaster of Get Real Philippines