Meralco’s new bill addition is exposing people
Another week, another new ragebait. This month’s Meralco bills have been rolling out, and quite a few people have noticed a couple of new line additions in the breakdown: the “lifeline” and the senior citizen charges. And boy, let’s get straight to it: People are mad. Mad mad. I actually don’t know where to start explaining these layers on layers of unrest because you also have to be chronically online to understand what’s happening to people right now, but here’s my attempt.
To be clear, the “lifeline” and the senior citizen charge are charges intended to help pay for the typically minimal power usage of poorer or indigent Meralco customers. This is actually mandated by the government in Republic Act 11552, or the Expanded Lifeline Rate Act, passed by former President Rodrigo Duterte back in May 2021.
The lifeline charges are going to 4Ps beneficiaries, and this is what’s been triggering a lot of the proud “middle-class” Meralco customers.
The jealous, matapobre rage against 4Ps
If you’ve hung around social media a lot lately (and good for you if you’re able to just keep yourself away from it), you might have noticed that there is an undercurrent of snobbish discrimination against the lower class.
Specifically, the “4Ps” class—referring to the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program enacted by the Department of Social Welfare and Development—which provides conditional cash transfers to poor families in need of help in order to break the chain of poverty. The poor don’t make it out of poverty by sheer willpower alone. You have to invest in them, which is the logic behind this social policy.
The operative word of the 4Ps is “conditional,” meaning the recipients have to meet important criteria to get that money. These criteria include actually sending their children to school, making sure they’re healthy by visiting health centers, and more.
You see—or you probably already know this if you’re one of them—the so-called “middle-class” absolutely hates this.
I come across so many posts on social media from some proudly proclaiming middle-class Pinoys who constantly whine about them not getting help from the government the way the “lazy” poor people do, and about the fact that their taxes are being used to help the poor who they feel “don’t deserve” help. Some have even openly proclaimed their biases, raging about how they believe the poor don’t deserve the same comforts and amenities the rest of us do, just because they belong in a different tax bracket.
And the fact that the lifeline rate is finally being enacted five years after its passing is a whole new front on this ridiculous class war that’s triggered Filipinos anew.
All this anger over a handful of pesos
Of course, all of this middle-class rage is wrong and laughable. The one thing they actually get right? We all deserve help.
It’s funny how people will rage against leftist social policies on paper but cry out for government help when things start to get tight. Who doesn’t want the free money and high-quality services that we’re actually paying for with our taxes, right? All the taxes, not just the income tax of the gainfully employed—and this includes the blanket value-added tax imposed on all products and services that even people with smaller incomes and no regular jobs are forced to pay. So the first thing they get wrong is assuming that poor people don’t pay taxes.
The second thing they get wrong is about how comfortably middle-class they think they are. The spectrum of classes isn’t as varied here in the Philippines: there’s really only the rich, and then there’s the rest of us. If you’re crying about not getting the same monetary help from the government as the people who are not in the same position to make the money that a person with a regular income makes, then… you’re not as middle-class as you think. You actually can’t handle inflation as well as you think, and you’re one major incident away from being poor.
The third thing is assuming all poor people are poor because they’re lazy. They see a tambay or an unemployed person and think they’re not working because they don’t have the same opportunities as someone who has a college degree. They’ll see them getting a new gadget or appliance via the 4Ps and immediately think they don’t deserve it because they’re not wasting away in some corporate job, enduring the daily commute, and giving up a portion of their salary to taxes and deductions. That’s a you problem, and a lot of times that’s only going to be fixed by a real reality check where life comes at you fast.
The fourth thing is the most ridiculous of all: the lifeline and senior citizens rate is literally a handful of pesos, as a percentage of your total Meralco bill. I haven’t even seen a lifeline charge reach P10! The fact that people are angry over a mere handful of pesos proves all the more that they’re not as middle-class as they say they are—and most worryingly, proves that a lot of Filipinos are terrible.
Who should we really be angry at?
The weak argument I keep seeing against the lifeline rate is that the government subsidy should just come from the country’s coffers, and not directly from the customers’ wallets. But here’s where you know a lot of people weren’t paying attention to their Araling Panlipunan classes: The money in the national coffers comes from taxation, meaning that’s still the people’s money.
Regardless of where the subsidy is coming from, the people are still footing the bill. So all this controversy has done is really just expose that Filipinos don’t like it when their money is being used to help those in need. They would rather think it was someone else’s cash, even if it was really theirs.
That, and they would rather get mad at a poorer family enjoying a rare comfort than a politician enriching themselves from the money that’s supposed to go to public services. The funny and sad thing is, despite clamoring for it constantly every election season, we’re not actually ready to see our government help the least of us—the same way we weren’t ready to have an actual competent leader lead the Philippines.
May the universe save us all.
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