Tighten your belts, folks!

we can count on your words.

Don’t just wait for complaints to - dinary consumers don’t have much time to spare to go through the

We all know that the single act of Congress to raise taxes creates a dominoeffect on consumer prices. Not only that, utility companies have already announced rate adjustments.

petitions for fare rate increases by almost half of the current rates.

Ride-hailing company Grab has asked the Land Transportation Franchising Regulatory Board (LTFRB) for to P14 per kilometer traveled to P11 to increase its P2 per minute charge to P2.10 per minute.

A labor group has stated that it will there is an extraordinary increase in prices of basic commodities such as is an excessive surge in the cost of services such as transport fares, tuition fees, electricity and water rates.

Any wage increase is yet another situation that businesses take advan- tage of to raise prices of commodities. We are indeed in a never-ending race for price adjustments.

Don’t get hoodwinked by the hype that you will have a higher take-home pay starting this month owing to the higher income tax exemptions. As I have said in my previous pieces about this, the additional amount is easily eaten up by price increases. Yet, basic services are consistently deteriorating.

Maybe those who are in positions of power or have much easymoney to burn don’t feel what ordinary workers have to endure to hurdle everyday challenges.

I just hope to see government tightening its spending to make sure that every centavo in tax money is spent judiciously. I wish that President Duterte does not engage in double talk in his campaign against corruption in the bureau for unnecessary foreign travels, then he should also limit the size of his entourages duringhis foreign trips by excluding junketeers.

Scrimping on travel and unnecessary spending like hiring incompetents is an important element of good governance.