A government technocrat said recently he was "very worried" that economic policies are not hurting the poor enough.



According to Dr. Maghirap Kayo, "I am gravely concerned. We designed our policies to crush the poor, really oppress them - but they're still there, whining."



He said: "We economic planners lose sleep thinking up ways to really blight the lives of the poor. We've increased VAT, fuel and food prices, devalued the peso, made transportation inefficient and unaffordable, put reasonable housing beyond the reach of the majority, denied contractual laborers regular jobs.



"We've even sold our territory to China and incurred usurious loans from Beijing that will surely bury the poor and their families to the next seven generations in miserable ground scraping debt."



Dr Kayo exclaimed, "This is no joke! God knows we're trying, and yet at the end of the day I have to ask myself, are we really hurting those people? The pests are still out there, bitching and complaining."



He called those who expressed concern about the poor "idiots".



"Don't they know the poor actually have it so good? To begin with, they have no money so they don't have to worry about budgeting. Then they have no jobs so they don't have to worry about commuting and being late for work. They have free education and free masking tape complete with cardboard placards. It's all we can do to steal whatever money they have through high taxes on beer and sugar."



By comparison, he claimed, "we technocrats are under so much pressure! We need to raise lots of money. To pay for infrastructure, for projects, for officials who want to live in five-star hotels, for bloated allowances, for tourism undersecs' junkets, for security guard agencies owned by a government official. We need billions!



"Don't you know this administration is targeting a very high ROP - Rate of Plunder?"



The economist recalled, "when Congress proposed their first tax reform, I was really upset, because it wasn't oppressive enough. Thank goodness we managed to adjust it."



Asked to comment on the country's inequality, which sees one percent of the population controlling 50 percent of the wealth, Dr Kayo replied: "And whose fault is that? If the poor only worked harder, they wouldn't be poor, those silly smelly people. Let them eat cake, the cry babies."



He said the poor had to pay so that the country could develop. "After all this, we'll have great infrastructure that the poor can look at admiringly!"



According to the technocrat, "for our country to develop, the people have to experience some pain."



"Except me, of course, I'm a government official."

Disclaimer: The views in this blog are those of the blogger and do not necessarily reflect the views of ABS-CBN Corp.