Loathing high prices

“It turns out I’m not the only one loathing inflation.”

Politics is always about people, none of us should ever forget that. And borrowing a famous phrase, a spectre is haunting people – the spectre of rising food prices.

No denying a perceptible rumble of complaints, especially from the poor, about that spectre and it grows loud by the day.

It’s a spectre that even haunts the one food item both rich and poor Pinoys can’t do without — rice.

Of rice, the other day I witnessed a scene about rice in a depressed community nearby where I often visit a favorite sari-sari store for my choice of societal subversion — cigarettes. A little girl stood beside me and we were before a display of rice varieties, with prices from P42 to P47 a kilo. The tyke was carefully counting loose change and then her face lit up: she had enough money to buy a half-kilo of rice.

I felt happy she had enough money to buy rice, enough for a half-kilo of the P45 variety. But I also felt sad and depressed. A few months back, with just five or six pesos more she would have gone home with a kilo of NFA rice. Rice prices have not retreated even by a single week over the past six months, even if there was a mad scramble to import rice to bring prices down.

Damn me if you will if you find I just sinned with a logical fallacy, the fallacy of anecdotal evidence. Such fallacy is the discounting of other evidence arrived at by systematic search or testing in favor of a few firsthand stories.

But I’ve thrown sobriety out of the window. Better an ignoble alarmist than to sleep-off the urgency of taming the rising prices of food and goods or inflation.

Damn me too if you find me a brown version of a hysterical male. What can I do? I have no choice as I need to do something, in the way I know best, about helping the missus cope with her rising anxieties over a tightening household budget.

It turns out I’m not the only one loathing inflation. Mr. Duterte’s recent record low satisfaction ratings is precisely because of inflation.

More and more attuned politicians are also sprinting out of the shadows to challenge government to dispense with all talk about justifying inflation and just do something about it, and quickly too.

Government also loathes inflation but I find they somehow lack passion, probably because they don’t know exactly what will work against inflation.

But while government is still being cushy about the whole thing, I find it sickening living with the technocratic babble explaining inflation. Enough of that! Can’t government functionaries use plain, popular language to explain clearly why prices keep on rising? Why all the mystery? It is not helping keeping tempers down.

It is a sin which has even infected the likes of former comedian and now Senate President Tito Sotto, who says without batting an eyelash, the solution to inflation is for the Central Bank to increase interest rates. Duh? Who even understands that? Can’t Sotto have enough sense to try to explain what increasing interest rates mean using the language the Eat Bulaga audience understands?

At any rate, even if we understood what raising interest rates mean, we can’t even be nonchalant about it as there are tremendous risks involved.

“To be fair, the TRAIN law isn’t fully a wreckage.”

As a friend of mine wrote to me privately: “Raising interest rates is what Central Banks indeed do when they are encountered with inflation. The higher interest rates are supposed to lower business borrowing, and lower economic growth. Lower growth in turn is supposed to lower inflation.”

“But this formula works best when inflation is the result of an overheated economic growth.

However, if inflation is due to higher raw material costs due to devaluation or taxes, raising interest rates will only depress growth without lowering inflation.”

Aha! So there! That explains why the Central Bank, which hates risks and gambling, needs long, brain-wracking meetings over interest rates. Best to leave the Central Bank alone then, I guess.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t look for other solutions or to look at other culprits. Just about everybody I know detest the TRAIN law as they see it abetting inflation. A friend sums up the opposition: “The latest round of taxes, e.g. the excise tax on fuel/gasoline, the plethora of taxes in the TRAIN law are the main triggers of price increases, abetted by profiteering by some…”

To be fair, the TRAIN law isn’t fully a wreckage: we do need to reform our old unequal tax system where a common employee had a heavier tax burden than a well-paid doctor or a high-flying lawyer.

But TRAIN has had bad timing and our economic managers mistakenly gambled in adding more taxes to fuel. And, as we all know, profiteering scums always used fuel prices, as well as the sinking peso, to go partying and grab loot bags.

As to why, at the moment, government is pretty much looking like a toothless nag against the profiteering scum, unlike that against the shabu peddler, I really don’t have any idea.

Inaction too has political risks. Once government is found to be no longer speaking for the people, once the people feel betrayed, abandoned, neglected, deserted they will play the game of mass politics, to test their power against government. Hungry stomachs do that.