Unsound nation
Self-rated low-income families have climbed from 48 percent of households in June 2022, the month Marcos took office, to 52 percent as of a March 2026 survey.
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Daily TribuneSelf-rated low-income families have climbed from 48 percent of households in June 2022, the month Marcos took office, to 52 percent as of a March 2026 survey.
Four years ago, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. stood before Congress and declared, with conviction, that the state of the nation was sound, that he felt it in his mind, his heart, his very soul.
Attached to that avowal were the numbers: 6.5 to 8-percent annual growth through 2028; debt below 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025; and, most telling, upper middle-income country (UMIC) status by 2024. These were commitments the President asked Congress to work for through his legislative agenda.
The UMIC promise is where the gap between rhetoric and reality is most revealing, because this year Malacañang finally got to claim it, two years late, and nearly hollowed out as most Filipinos profess not feeling it.
The World Bank has reclassified the Philippines as a UMIC, and the Palace brought out the fireworks, but the number that earned the label — $4,850 gross national income (GNI) per capita — describes an average, not a distribution of wealth.
State researchers at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) count barely 1.1-million households in the upper-middle bracket — four percent of households — but just 2.7 percent of the population.
IBON Foundation’s independent tally puts the figure even lower, at three percent. On the other end, roughly eight or nine of every 10 Filipino families remain poor, low income and precariously vulnerable.
Worse than the mirage is the actual situation underneath. This was supposed to be an administration that would lift people out of poverty as it grew the economy.
Instead, self-rated low-income families climbed from 48 percent of households in June 2022, the month Marcos took office, to 52 percent as of a March 2026 survey.
The productive base has faltered alongside it. Manufacturing has shrunk to 17.4 percent of GDP, its smallest share in 76 years. Agriculture has fallen to 7.9 percent, the smallest share on record. These are not abstractions for a country that promised jobs and rice at P20 a kilo, which are reasons middle-class households report high prices and shrinking purchasing power even as the headline GDP chart points upward.
The fiscal picture completed the delusion. Debt closed 2025 at roughly 63 percent of GDP, a 21-year high, against the promise in Marcos’ first SoNA of below 60.
The deficit, meant to be tracking toward three percent by 2028, is still running north of 5.6 percent. National debt has grown by nearly P6 trillion since Marcos took office.
Then there was the promise most directly overtaken by events: “Build Better More,” the infrastructure program he pitched in 2022 as his signature legacy project.
From a signature achievement, it became the epicenter of the flood control corruption scandal.
It was Marcos’ own 2025 SoNA outburst, “Mahiya naman kayo,” that highlighted the failure, as the follow-through became performative and raised as many questions as it answered, with the real culprits still untouched.
The strong words have not produced the prosecutions the outrage demanded, and the administration has faced doubts about the sincerity and selectiveness of its own investigation.
A promise to build better has instead exposed how much was never built at all — only billed.
The Palace dumps the blame on global headwinds for not meeting the crucial economic and fiscal goals.
Four years on, the economy is slowing down while the claimed progress, shown on paper, is shrinking in places Filipinos actually live it, in their payslips, in their grocery bills, on the factory floors.
The failed governance that is reflected in the widening core of poverty is not a vindication of the 2022 promise. It is its epitaph.
