LAST week's column in another broadsheet by my esteemed colleague, Mahar Mangahas of Social Weather Stations Inc. (SWS), was glaring proof of how our political elite and leadership have failed the country.

After "40 years of poverty surveying" (the column's title), the SWS discovered that the plight of poor Filipinos hardly changed during the last four decades. Mahar noted that in April 1983, 55 percent of the respondents had rated their families as "mahirap" (poor). Four decades later, in 2022, survey results showed that "fully half of all Filipino families are poor, and only one-fifth are not poor, despite a doubling in income per person in real terms, i.e., corrected for inflation."

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