As we kick off 2019, one of the burning issues will be the question of incremental excise taxes on petroleum products, those un-executed remnants of the excise provisions providing for phased-in escalation originally within last year’s excise taxation initiatives.

It is not new legislation but part of the old. The 2018 Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) included provisions for an increase in the excise taxes on fuel scheduled for 2019 to run parallel with the scheduled cash outflows under the infrastructure initiatives coming from an initial period of bidding and predevelopment activity that immediately went into play when the administration took over.

These have all been preprogrammed and planned among the major agencies tasked to carry out the “Build, Build, Build” centerpiece program of the Duterte administration. It’s a chemistry of funding and spending. The objective is real productivity and elusive economic development.

While the government, specifically the Chief Executive, has the power to suspend these incremental fuel excise taxes as part of his Executive powers, he can only slide the calendar and move the tax’s effectivity to a more opportune time — a skill no one has yet mastered in these volatile times.

The escalation has been written and signed into law. To remove it totally would require an amendment which some solons thought of proposing given the forthcoming 2019 elections, their original roles in passing TRAIN and the inflation their actions were thought to have spawned. That, however, would mean yielding to myopic political agenda more than reason.

It would effectively be declaring that taxes create inflation.

We totally disagree with media analysts and partisan critics who blame Rodrigo R. Duterte’s tax reform initiatives under TRAIN for the 2018 astronomical increase in inflation. Their criticism was all passion bereft of brainpower. Without doing the arithmetic, it was all too easy if not overly simplistic to simply cite the various excise taxes under TRAIN as those coincided with the increase in the consumer price index, the official metric that tracks prices.

Moreover, of late, note the politicization of the taxation initiatives in the worsening fight between the House and the Cabinet. The other day, the House Majority Leader warned that the Duterte economic plan was not only “unresponsive” but, if pursued through the proposed budget by the current Budget secretary, it may cause a “political upheaval.” That those utterances are alarmist is certain. That there is a veiled threat is characteristic of trapos fed and fattened on pork barrels.

The mud fights have extended to the question of taxation, specifically on the incremental excise taxes scheduled for 2019.

Just this week, fuel pump prices had risen unexpectedly after serial bouts of price decreases during the yuletide holidays. The knee-jerk reaction was that these increases were due to TRAIN. It’s about time solons understand the calculus behind fuel price setting and the impact of excise taxes on the final pump prices versus the global external factors that, on a weighted average basis, are far greater determinants than domestic inputs.

The increase in pump prices this week starting Monday, 7 January, was due to the computed difference between the Mean of Platts-Singapore and the foreign exchange differentials of the week that started on 31 December 2018 arrayed against the averages for the week of 24 December 2018. In effect the pricing reflects movements in the international oil market at the close of 2018 — not in 2019 when the incremental increases in petroleum excises are scheduled to kick in.

When TRAIN was first rolled out in 2018, it unfortunately coincided with geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. We’ve learned our lesson on timing the imposition of taxes where global inflationary factors are not simply imminent but are constantly omnipresent and volatile.

Critics’ incendiary comments notwithstanding, those conditions are not present now.