CHICKENPIEThe gas pump goes up again. Week five. You’re not imagining the receipt.
Diesel is up P7.32 per liter as of July 28. Gasoline, P6.80. If you’re keeping a scoreboard — and at this point you should be, because nobody in the DOE press office is doing it for you — the running total over five consecutive weeks of increases is starting to look like a phone number. A Pasig phone number, where the area code is a bad omen, the subscriber number is your monthly budget, and the last four digits are the amount you have left after filling up.
Meanwhile, the peso just closed at P61.847 to the dollar. A record low. A historic achievement in the wrong direction. The kind of number you’d print on a commemorative plate, except the only thing you’re commemorating is the cost of living.
Here’s how this lands in a Filipino household: electricity went up last month. LPG the month before. Rice hasn’t come back down since the last time the government promised it would — and that was before most of these fuel price hikes even started. And now the diesel that powers the jeepney that gets you to the job that pays for all of the above just added P7.32 to the math — for the fifth week straight.
Seven pesos. Per liter. Again.
The government is monitoring the situation. They have been monitoring it since P46. They monitored it through P50. Through P55. They were monitoring very carefully when it crossed P60. At P61.847 — the new record — the monitoring continues. At this rate, the monitoring program has a longer streak than the price hikes.
Drive past a Petron station tonight. Count the jeepney drivers doing math on their phones. That math — undelivered to Congress, unmentioned in the SONA — is the real state of the nation.
The pump doesn’t care about the speech.
