Many among us senior citizens have already realized that we were never included in the group that was to be pursued as beneficiaries of inclusive growth under PNoy’s Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016.
But isn’t this realization expected? Despite rosy economic growth rates that PNoy has regularly harped about in the past 5 1/2 years, he still adamantly refuses to adjust our social security pensions.
We call that lone PNoy five-percent SSS pension increase in 2014 a “consuelo de bobo”—it was not a pension adjustment.
Indigent senior citizens must have felt the same despite being recipients of the token P500 social pension. That amount, after all, was never adjusted by PNoy since the time President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo signed its grant into law on Feb. 15, 2010, five months before the end of her term of office.
Worse, the law entitled to the P500 all indigent citizens who were at least 60 years old but only those who were 77 years old were awarded this stipend. Lack of funding was the reason given by the program’s administrator—the Department of Social Welfare and Development —for excluding other indigent senior citizens.
Fortunately, starting January this year, those aged 65 years old and above—estimated at 940,000—have been included provided they were “frail, sickly or with disabilities; who do not have regular support from relatives; no permanent source of income; and are not receiving pensions from the SSS, GSIS or Veterans Pension Administration.”
But the younger senior citizens remain excluded.
The Philippine Development Plan—with its generalized definition of inclusive growth as a “sustained growth that creates jobs, draws the majority into the economic and social mainstream, and continuously reduces mass poverty”—was not clear, anyway, on how senior citizens would become part of our inclusive growth.
Even the optimists among us have given up on our being drawn into the economic and social mainstream.
After all, we pensioner senior citizens are now jobless and could no longer be included in any economic growth unlike the younger employed workers who directly share in it—in trickles, maybe—via wage increases or income tax reductions.
Why should pensions be adjusted periodically? We now only rely on them. If they remain stagnant, we wouldn’t be able to cope up with the rapidly increasing standard of living.
The harshness of our climate conditions has made coping even more difficult.
As we endure seasonal typhoons and floods, La Niña heavy rains and El Niño dry spells, the deterioration of our financial conditions is hastened toward poverty.
If truly unlucky, any single disaster could wipe out our lifetime savings and immediately make us join the millions of poor Filipinos.
Has PNoy realized this when he attended the climate change summit in Paris and delivered last Monday—like all other 142 heads of state—a three-minute message at the Leaders Event? We doubt it.
PNoy has also actively promoted inclusive growth in the South East Asian region during the Asean Summit in Kuala Lumpur just a week ago.
Significantly, he and the other Asean leaders announced at the end of that summit on Nov. 22 the creation of the Asean Economic Community—an economic integration among Asean member states—that will begin on Dec. 31, 2015.
How we wish that our country would not be left behind by our counterpart Asean countries when they achieve their growth targets and become more peaceful and prosperous.
We can only hope that younger Filipinos would reap the fruits of this economic integration and attain the same high level of financial success of their Asean counterparts.
But would they have to do this as the ever reliable and hardworking overseas Filipino workers?
For us retired and jobless pensioners, the only way that we could be included in the economic and social mainstream—not left behind and poor at retirement—is for our pensions to be adjusted and indexed to inflation.
And approving that P2,000 pension adjustment of Congressman Neri Colmenares and augmenting the P500 social pensions are the first steps.
In fact, adjusting pensions is the usual way old-age pensioners share in the economic growth in other countries.
In the United States, for instance, pensions are automatically adjusted yearly based on the movement of the consumer price index. Funding is also automatically raised by adjusting the maximum salary that is subject to contributions, which is triggered, on the other hand, by the average wage index.
The US Social Security Administration announces these adjustments early in the fourth quarter and implements them effective on Jan.1 of the following year.
It announced last Oct. 15, however, that there won’t be any pension adjustment in 2016 because the CPI did not move up this year. Neither would the maximum salary subject to social security contributions be adjusted.
We senior citizens should not be left to fend for ourselves in our old age. Our society would be uncaring if it would only blame us for having grown old without having saved enough.
We have to be included, too, in our growth.
