Marcos' poverty reduction claims highly dubious

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. spent an hour and a half delivering his State of the Nation Address (SONA), rattling off so many details we don't really care about nor have the capacity to cross-check their veracity. However, he uttered only 84 words, or 1 percent of his 9,035-word-long speech, about a topic that is the main concern of Filipinos: poverty.

I suspect he was not really keen on discussing poverty as he knew that he had done very little — if at all — to reduce poverty. Still, though, he boasted: "We have lifted nearly two-and-a-half-million Filipinos out of poverty."