Wrong budget priorities are threatening to deepen the economy’s slide after growth slowed to 2.3 percent in the second quarter, from 2.8 percent in the previous three months.

The key indicators are dismal. Gross fixed capital formation contracted 13.7 percent, while construction fell 14.8 percent and durable-equipment investment dropped 13.6 percent. The pullback points to a broad weakening in investment that should be laying the groundwork for future growth.

Economists are particularly concerned about the slowdown in fixed investment because this is the money that builds tomorrow’s factories, businesses and jobs. When investment dries up, tomorrow dries up with it.

Experts lamented that none of this had to happen since the country has a comprehensive plan for progress. It is called the Philippine Development Plan. Economists wrote it and identified which sectors should get the money and why.

It stated that infrastructure should follow the regions that drive growth, not the preferences of whoever influences Congress and the Palace. That plan sat on a shelf while something else guided the use of public funds: political survival.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the men around him are obviously guided by the next elections, two years away. Budgets got carved up like meat at a feast and handed to lawmakers, not because a region needed a road, but because a Marcos candidate needed a district to remember his name.

This is the flood control scandal all over again. Money meant for dikes and drainage became patronage money; now cash doles or ayudas get priority.

It happened three years running. When a wrong repeats for three straight budget cycles, it is no longer negligence; it is complicity.

The President had the tools to stop this. He could have told Congress no or vetoed line items that ignored the administration’s blueprint.

Political will has left this administration, as the President let the money move in a way that bought him peace with the people who write his budget.

That is the trade-off: growth for quiet. He traded the development plan for a coalition.

Every peso diverted into a senator’s pet project was a peso not spent on the ports, roads and irrigation that actually raise output.

Economists call this an opportunity cost, which to ordinary Filipinos means a lost job, a missed harvest, or a delayed school building.

Politicians preparing for 2028 want visible spending emblazoned with their name. A road with a senator’s name on the marker beats a road that quietly appears because a technical plan called for it.

Populist gestures such as minimum wage hikes with no funding plan and subsidies are designed for the polls, and they cost money nobody has budgeted.

A country cannot spend its way out of a hole its own opportunistic leaders dug.

The fix starts with something simpler than any stimulus package: leaders with the will to follow the plan they wrote, instead of the instinct that keeps them in office.