CCT is like pouring water into a drain

THIS IS a continuation of my column last Wednesday on the P21-billion Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program:

The CCT program is a non-productive endeavor and therefore a waste of money. It is like pouring money into a drain. When the money is exhausted, the beneficiaries would still be poor and not a single peso worth of anything would have been produced except, most likely, more babies.

The amount of P1,400 would be given to each “poorest of the poor” family. The only condition is that the children go to school and that pregnant women go to health centers for medical checkups. This is a sure recipe to encourage laziness and to increase the birth rate.

Each pregnant woman will be given P500 monthly. So won’t that encourage the men to keep their wives pregnant? And each child going to school will get P400 a month. So won’t this encourage the men to have more children so that the family would get more benefits?

On the other hand, won’t this also encourage the men not to look for jobs? Why bother when they would eat anyway?

As for the men, they are not required to do anything. They can stay home and scratch their balls and they would still eat. They don’t have to look for jobs. Why bother? They and their families will eat anyway, courtesy of the Filipino taxpayers.

And if the family’s financial condition improves, it would be taken off the list of beneficiaries. So won’t that encourage the men to keep their families very poor so they would continue to receive the doles? They would be like the Filipinos in the United States receiving unemployment benefits. They don’t want to have jobs because then they would lose their unemployment benefits. So won’t the CCT encourage the men to remain unemployed?

With time on their hands and with money to spend, the men will most likely spend the day drinking with all the other jobless men of the barangay. The jueteng lords will be very happy. The poorest people will now have the money to bet on the illegal numbers game.

Then there are the masiao, jai-alai, sakla, monte and other forms of gambling which people, although jobless, can now afford to engage in because of the CCT.

And with the men not doing anything the whole day, you know what they think about. As the saying goes, the idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Well rested and bored to death, you know what they will do to their wives when darkness falls.

The right tack, as I see it, is to make the beneficiaries work for their CCT. Make them clean their communities, police their neighborhood against neighbors throwing their garbage into the waterways, employ the men to clean the esteros, creeks and rivers, plant trees, cultivate backyard gardens or employ them in repairing roads. Or teach them various means of livelihood. Instead of being beggars, they will become useful citizens. They will be proud of their work. But as beggars, they will just sink deeper into laziness and become human parasites.

I am reminded of a poor man that the administration of President Fidel V. Ramos tried to help. The government spent millions of pesos for him, even giving him a television program as a publicity gimmick for the administration. The man never improved himself. Instead, he took another wife, begot more children and died as poor as ever. Moral lesson: make a man work to improve himself. He would be proud of his achievements. Don’t encourage laziness.

Then there is the Department of Social Welfare and Development which is the agency primarily responsible for implementing the CCT program. With so much money available to it, the first thing it would spend on is a fleet of trucks. At first, it was rumored that the DSWD would buy luxury SUVs.

Not true, said Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman. Not SUVs but trucks.

A truck costs three times more than an SUV, from P5 million to P10 million per unit, depending on the make and brand. So you can imagine the cost of a fleet of trucks. And think of the commissions.

Then the DSWD will hire at least 1,500 additional personnel, allegedly to monitor the implementation of the CCT. So a big chunk of the CCT fund would be spent for trucks and additional DSWD personnel even before the first of the “poorest of the poor” families gets its first peso. –Neal Cruz, Philippine Daily Inquirer