poverty is a worldwide problem, even in first world countries - they also have people who doesn’t know how to handle money and right priorities, it so happens that their government has a budget that goes to where it should go.

we can’t just blame the government regarding poverty. people should know how to budget and prioritize their money. lalo na ang mga low-income group, who spends most of their money to luxuries and things that are not needed.

maybe the government could make a step forward fighting poverty by teaching values, entrepreneurship, and basic money management even to elementary students. giving money to poor people would not help them.

Im a mother of 3 children too, its heartbreaking to read news as this,desperation could have probably lead this mother to do such.
Saving them from further sufferings? of hunger perhaps? we will never know..
talking is useless without any action,and that i think is the only thing the philippine government is doing
teach people how to fish not give them fish
in other third world country international microfinancing helps the poor to fend for themselves.i wonder if there’s one in the phils

Suicide is never rational. It is almost always a result of clinical depression, and no, I am not talking about just being down. I am talking about a clinical, biological, chemicals-out-of-balance disease. Yes, we can use this case to discuss bigger political issues but we shouldn’t escape the fact that this mother was clinical depressed. She was sick and needed help. In our rush to pronounce on the politics, let’s not forget her and her child’s humanity. She was sick, depressed, and no one helped her.

As for whether society or the government is responsible, I say “It’s the same question.” Society has responsibilities. Governments are just one form that society takes, one tool it (we) use to solve our problems. Sometimes we come together and form families. Sometimes we come together and form churches. Sometimes civic groups, friendships, or basketball teams. And sometimes we call ourselves “government”.

Our governments (national to barangay) have no responsibilities independent of society. Governments are merely a tool, a means, for us to solve our problems. The question is not “Is it some government’s responsibility?” But “Is it our responsibility and is one of the governments the best tool for us to use to fulfill that responsibility?”

I have been blogging regarding the overpopulation in the Philippines, after reading that the current birth rate in PI is about 25.2 and the death rate is only about 5,4 per 1000. Economist have been predicting that if the birth rates and death rate remain the same, in 20 years the Philippines will be an economic disaster zone. I have been urging our government officials, churches and private organization to start educating the poor and uneducated in the Philippines, via my blog , http://economicdisasterphilippines.blogspot.com
I hope something positive happens soon.

Sometimes poverty is a choice. I have nephews and nieces whom we sent to some of the nicest schools to have a better life. It’s a given. All Filipinos knows these cycles. Unfortunately, either we’ve cuddled them too much or they splurged way too much and ended up with teenage pregnancies, not finishing school, out of job, getting (un)married to another individual who pretty much have the same life story. End game? (Un)married with kids, no work and living day by day out of dole outs. Me? I’ve pretty much ignored them out of anger and resignation. I’m sure they’re learning their lessons now. I hope they won’t do the same exercise with the linked story, otherwise, I have my own share of blame. But at least, as the song goes and even my parents would agree with me.. “I did my best, but my best is just not good enough, so here they are poor as a bumblebee”.

Every country in the world has their poverty problem. Believe me, I’ve lived here in the United States long enough to have seen the worst but also experienced the best and even be part of it. And I know that at least the government is attacking the problem with so many social programs. As a matter of fact, I worked (past tense) for the 4th largest housing agencies in the United States. We build low-income housing units targeting the lowest income brackets of the society. In return, the United States government gives us housing tax credits that in turn, we sell to investors who partners with us in several of these developments.

It does not stop there. We have Community Centers, Kids Activity Programs, and even for Adults (not the x’s), it’s the whole 9-yards. Heck, we even have music recording studios in our Community Centers. We offer a lot of social programs. We give them career development, education, job trainings, assistance in small business and many, many other programs essentially to assist them to be productive in the society. In turn, the lower rentals and to a point free utilities helped them to be out of poverty.

The Philippines is unique given that the Church is one powerful voice and personally – and I know and I don’t care if I earn some condemnation from your readers (Hahaha!) – but the Church is dead wrong in its population policy and worse, the government or may I say, the administration is just kowtowing with what the Church says.

Poverty is one tough bloody evil to fight. It requires a combined and united effort from all fronts. The government, the Church, the school (education), the NGO’s and the population itself.

So, let me go back to your question – who do we blame?

Personally, I blame the parents. I blame the government. I blame the Church. I blame Education (or schools) and finally, I blame the population for believing misinformation campaigns on population controls and politicizing them.

Sorry Salve, nag-mukhang blog entry! Hehehe! Reynz of http://www.reynaelena.com

i totally agree with reyna elena:
……but the Church is dead wrong in its population policy and worse, the government or may I say, the administration is just kowtowing with what the Church says.

if a family has only one fish to divide among 3 people, they are less hungry than a family of 6.

my father was a product of extreme poverty. a child of a literally insane mother, he was able to send himself to school, finish it and get a stable job. he’s now retired but does full-time consultant jobs.

because of our good fortune, my parents helped a lot of my mother’s siblings, nephews and nieces. they gave them money for tuition, basic needs and others. but despite all the financial support, only one of my cousins was able to graduate from college.

my point is, poverty is not an excuse. it is never a deterrent to succeed. no matter how much or little help you get, if you don’t want to help yourself, then nothing will happen in your life.

Maybe the mother has low threshold to problems, pressures and depression. In such cases, she needs psychological treatment and counselling.

When one is in a dire financial situation like that, we do not know what is lurking in thier confused minds. When the world seem to be closing in on them, they think that the great escape is the ultimate solution to all their problems.

Indeed overpopulation is the root cause of all these problems and there is the lack of spine of this government to implement the right measures.

i recently wrote a blot entitled ‘abusive poor’. don’t mind the title, it’s just there to catch my wife’s attention. but my point is sometimes, the society and the government have done their part to help the poor. it’s just that the poor sometimes choose to remain poor by not doing their part and by continuing to ask for dole outs. after all, charity has its limits.

sus reyna elena……. are you telling us that you are party to the subprime mess?

your company sell houses to the poor then packaged those mortgage as high return financial instrument, now that those people are not capable to pay……

that’s the whole gist of the subprime mess…. selling things to people not capable of paying, using other peoples’s money to leverage, then let government save their skin from the mess you guys started …. for profit

let me play the other side for once……. if a person can barely feed oneself….. can you find time to create not just one kid but kids? is it the society that makes her conceive? i think she made a choice there….. who then, is to be blamed for the consequences of those acts? the person? the society? or the government?

government are made of people not unlike us….. society are us….. so am i/you to be blamed for the death of the mother and her childen?

i hope every filipino will have sufficient IQ, EQ and AQ to avoid this kind of tragedy in the future.

[...] Services « Tipping point of poverty [...]

I believe that being broke is a choice. But poverty is not.

Being broke means finding yourself incapable to support your lifestyle, despite the fact that you have the education, resources, and know-how to pull yourself out of that situation.

Poverty, on the other hand, is too big and complex a problem that I believe I’ll be insulting the poor people of the world if I think I can claim to explain poverty in one paragraph.

The woman poisoning herself and her family, I believe that she was not fully equipped to handle that situation. She probably didn’t have the opportunity to grow an entrepreneurial mind, because this is something that is cultivated only in encouraging environments, which this woman probably didn’t experience. She wasn’t aware that as a woman, she did not need to depend on her husband for resources. These things may seem like common sense to you and I, but it’s not. We are only empowered with this knowledge because we have been educated by responsible parents, and went to good schools. Did this woman even finish high school?

If you’re hungry, you get delirious and do things you wouldn’t do if you were fed properly. This is illustrated best by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which shows that physiological needs such as food and water must first be met before you can expect someone to be self-actualized. In other words, what use is education if the people are hungry? What’s the use of opportunity? And as one of the commenters pointed out, it could also be that the woman had undiagnosed clinical depression.

Have you ever been starving? Do you know what starvation can do to a person?

As for the poor being ‘abusive’ as someone pointed out, there is a reason why they’re like that - because we (or, more accurately, the government) treat them as if cash subsidies and dole outs are the only way out. Because of their desperation, they prefer to eat now rather than look at long term solutions - and because of the lack of education and resources available to them, how will they know about these long term solutions?

Politicians themselves shy away from long term solutions because they take more work and the effects will only be seen years after they have left their position in government. Eh di mamigay na lang ng 500 pesos sa mga tao ngayon, kasi mas maaalala ka nila, at mas iboboto ka nila. Never mind that the 500 is fleeting and unsustainable.

Another reader also pondered the absurdity that we were to blame for the death of this family. I believe that we are partly to blame if we do not contribute to make our country better. And I’m not just talking about paying your taxes, which can go to the hands of corrupt officials. Do sponsor the education of an impoverished child? When was the last time you interacted with the poor and heard their stories from their own mouths instead of the news?

Personally, I still find myself lacking when it comes to contributing to making the Philippines a better place. But to take the story of this woman lightly and not to consider it as a symptom of real, widespread problems means that one isn’t looking closely enough.

Linoel,

you said: maybe the government could make a step forward fighting poverty by teaching values, entrepreneurship, and basic money management even to elementary students. giving money to poor people would not help them.

that’s just the thing. i see this happening already, maybe not yet widespread. maybe in small packets. maybe little groups doing little things at the same time. but sorry for sounding so depressed, sometimes i fear that all these little good deeds hardly make a dent. sigh. i just hope i’m wrong.

sansan, there are plenty of microfinance companies here in the philippines and some have been really successful at reaching the poor. i know that even former president cory aquino has focused on microfinancing for a bottoms-up approach of reducing poverty. but again, i wonder when it will all mean something. sorry, i hope i dont sound too negative.

Bruce in Iloilo, great point about clinical depression. If we follow your line of thinking, this can also happen in wealthy countries. Regarding figuring out who’s to blame, I now think its useless to do finger-pointing?

David B. Katague, almira, the figures show that more children are born in poor families than in rich families. even in conservative Catholic families that is the case. good values and education tend to be effective population control measures. chicken and egg situation? i still think the world is big enough for the population of the world and that God’s creation will be sufficient for His children, all things being equal, meaning mankind does not squander those resources.

reyna elena, leela, chris, i have seen this happen first hand, too, perhaps, sadly, more frequently than the success stories that we also know intimately. the one thing that’s clear is that everybody has got to do something about it, and that we can’t give up.

ACN: i bet you watched Umagang Kay Ganda this morning!

[...] My friendship, Salve Duplito, Editor of the Inquirer’s Money Smarts, posed this question in her blog. [...]

Chris on number 10, I will answer you in 2 comments. Here’s the 1st part. I’ll post this in my blog kasi my readers were asking me kung gwapo daw tong si subprime:

Subprime mess started because of some fly-by night mortgage companies and invidivuals who wanted to profit on the housing boom. Subprime is a little difficult to be understood by average Filipinos considering that we don’t have mortgage companies here. What we have are post-dated checks dib a? Hahaha! Pag buy ka nang condo, give ka 60 pieces of post-dated checks. Here no.

When you buy a house, sometimes there’s a “3-points or 2-points” that you pay which is a percentage of the selling price. Those are actually commissions. That’s how these people make money. So, the more they bring in people to come on board and be a homeowner, the more money they make. They don’t check credit ratings no more and look deeper as to whether or not they can pay or have the ability to pay. One of the biggest tricks they did was the ARM (adjustable rate mortgage).

There were a lot of ARMs here even in my old neighborhood. 3 years, at some very low rate and they are really affordable, and when the true interest rate kicked in? Oh, and they forgot to tell you that the tax abatement expires in 3 years (sometimes) too! Now, if you’re the homeowner, you’ve just seen your monthly mortgage payment shoot up like a missile.

Now, these mortgages by homeowners typically goes to the bank.
All these mortgages at the bank are being sold to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and/or Ginnie Mac or straight to investment houses.
The next thing they do is package these mortgages, bundle them into say $1million each, call them a beautiful brand name, then sell them to investors who have no more idea that those were actually home mortgages because now, they’re called “Funds”.
But the reality is that, at very bottom of these “Funds”, the homeowner can no longer pay. There are more shit that they (mortgage companies) but that’s basically your subprime.

(to be continued)

This is my 2nd and last installment of my response to Chris of 10.

So were we involved in the subprime mess?

I mentioned housing tax credits. Every year, there’s a housing tax credit budget. IRS awards these to state housing agencies. State housing agencies in turn awards these to developers competitively. We are one of those real estate developers who submit proposals and if we win, we get the tax credits, sell it to investors and partner in a development as an investment. That tax credit can be used to reduce your federal tax liability. However, we are not your typical real estate developer, we are more focused in bringing affordable low income housing units to the city. That’s our goal.

Our development is only for low income people (we use HUD defined average median income), in other words, if you are earning a certain bracket a year, you can’t buy or rent our property. Our properties are rental and homeownership. There could no subprime on rentals only on homeownership.

So, could we be involved in the sub-prime mess? Nevah.

If you’re the 4th largest housing agency in the United Stated bounded by FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations), HUD audits, PHFA (housing finance agency audits), and a host of compliance audits, believe you me – that was by far the toughest job I had, and the waiting list to buy a unit in our developments stretches to over two years. Why? The rental units are subsidized by the government. The units for sale are at a very, very low price, sometimes half the current market price and follow a very stringent procedure and we are required by the state and the federal agencies to follow a lot of compliance procedures.

It’s the same process. The mortgage that we close (for those units we sold) goes to our investor partners who packages them and sells them to investors. I happen to be the person who managed all of these developments, partnerships and corporations. The best part of investing with us? You have the full backing of the United States of America. Can’t get that in some of the investments that you buy in Wall Street. Hehehe! Now, the last Standard and Poor’s I received in June 2008 for our developments? We we’re rated AA+.

You better help me find a job in Manila, Chris. Hehehe!

Chris, ooopps! Correcting entry here! Hahaha! Minor minor lang naman:

PHILADELPHIA, July 29, 2008 - PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ –

A newly released evaluation by Standard and Poor’s rates the [Company Name Deleted] on the same credit worthiness level as such companies as Procter & Gamble, Merck & Co. and United Parcel Service.

S&P says [Company Name Deleted] is strong and stable, an endorsement of [Company Name Deleted]’s ability to carry out its mission of developing and managing quality, public housing during a time of continuing cuts in federal funding.
S&P cited several factors as contributing to [Company Name Deleted]’s investment grade (AA-) rating.

I originally said AA+ kasi. My bad.

@ salve, yup yup!

I know the feeling of poverty and hopelessness, having just recovered from my family’s financial ruin 10 years ago. We lost everything during the 97′ Asian financial crisis when banks raised their loan interest rates to levels never seen before.

We lost our mortgaged house, our two cars and our construction business collapsed. My mother even contemplated of committing suicide. Those were the darkest days of our lives and just when I was starting to go to collage back then. But with determination and luck, me and my parents managed to bounce back. We should never loose hope, pray to God but most importantly work hard.