Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) denounced the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) for floating the claim that a Filipino surviving on P96 a day is no longer poor, describing the figure as a blatant distortion of the real conditions facing workers and ordinary Filipinos.
If the government insists that P96 a day is enough to live on, then it is not merely out of touch — it is insulting the poor. With inflation at 7.6 percent, the miserably low wages of workers and ordinary Filipinos are being eaten away every single day. A thousand pesos is now worth only around P720. That is the reality. So we ask the government: where did you pull this data claiming that P96 a day is enough for a Filipino to survive? Show us your basis.
The announcement is a cruel joke on a people bracing for a bleak holiday season.
There will be no merry Christmas for most Filipinos. It will be merry only for the corrupt politicians like Marcos and Duterte, and for the handful of oligarchs and bureaucrat capitalists who continue to rake in superprofits while the rest of the country tightens its belt.
Bayan also pointed to the glaring contradiction between the government’s austerity narrative for the poor and its lavish spending for visiting dignitaries.
According to this government, an ordinary Filipino can stretch P96 a day to get by — yet this same government is prepared to spend billions, book hotels, and serve the finest food for the incoming visit of Trump and the ASEAN leaders. P96 for the Filipino, billions for the foreign guests. That is the arithmetic of a government that serves imperialism and the ruling elite, not the people.
The poor are not numbers to be manipulated to make this administration look good. Poverty is not measured by what the state says in press briefings, but by whether a family can eat three times a day, send its children to school, and reach the hospital when they get sick.
We call on the government to stop fabricating data, raise wages to a genuine living level, and roll back the prices of food and fuel.
Bayan calls on the people to hold Marcos accountable for the worsening poverty by condemning and resisting his anti-poor and anti-people policies and programs. He is ready to roll out a red carpet welcome to war criminals and plunderers like Donald Trump while majority of Filipinos suffer from extreme poverty and oppression. Bayan calls for protests to condemn the subservience of Marcos and to reject the intensified war and plunder that Trump’s visit will bring to the country.