96-peso miracle

Congratulations, everyone! Stow your care packages away and cancel the charity drives. The state has officially declared us prosperous.

According to the latest government figures, a miraculous 6.5-million Filipinos were magically yanked out of poverty, shrinking our poverty incidence to a record single-digit low. The technocrats are patting themselves practically raw on the back. We have crossed the promised land, guided strictly by a formula that classifies any citizen earning more than P96 a day as “not poor.” Ninety-six pesos. That isn’t even enough to buy a single decent meal, a kilo of rice, and a jeepney ride home, but on paper, it makes you middle-class. What a triumph of arithmetic over appetite!

The state’s statistical wizardry is breathtaking. If you lower the bar into the subterranean dirt, suddenly everyone is a high jumper. Who needs actual wage hikes when you can simply redefine misery? Never mind that Social Weather Stations self-rated poverty surveys consistently show over half the country identifying as flat-out poor. Reality, it seems, is just an inconvenient outlier in a bureaucrat’s spreadsheet.

Step outside the press room and witness the direct results of this golden era. Look at our schools, where our youth receive world-class preparation for survival. Where else can a student learn algebra while dodging a stray bullet, ducking a classmate’s knife, or surviving relentless bullying before walking into a diploma mill that trades useless degrees for tuition fees? We don’t just educate; we run a combat simulation.

Scan the streets for our booming economy. The gross domestic product graphs climb gracefully upward, yet the average peso in a mother’s coin purse has been bled dry by relentless inflation.

Try telling a jeepney driver filling his tank with exorbitant crude that GDP growth is at five percent. Try explaining economic fundamentals to a father staring at an electricity bill that rivals his monthly rent. But take heart! Your wallet is empty, your household is drowning in debt, and a single emergency hospital visit will bankrupt three generations of your family — but mathematically, you are thriving.

Meanwhile, the daily quality of life remains a masterpiece of endurance. Commuters wait two hours in the rain for a bus, only to be robbed by thieves who operate with greater efficiency than our judicial system. Crime reports are neatly sanitized, systemic corruption continues unbothered in air-conditioned suites, and public health services remain a lottery where the grand prize is a rusty cot in a hospital hallway.

It is time we applauded this state-sponsored illusion. The government hasn’t eradicated poverty; it has merely outlawed it from our vocabulary. They changed the rules, ignored the hunger pains, and declared the war won.

So, celebrate, fellow ex-poor Filipinos. The next time your stomach grumbles, do not reach for food you cannot afford. Just read the press release. Swallow the statistics. You aren’t starving — you’re just misinterpreting the economic miracle.