THERE is something almost insulting about watching a fuel price hike explained on television by men in coats while a public school teacher in Iloilo is already doing arithmetic in her head that has nothing to do with her lesson plan.
A full tank for the motorcycle means less money for classroom snacks, printing, or a child’s project. A jeepney driver feels it by lunch. A market vendor feels it by dawn. A principal feels it when fewer parents can send children to school with enough baon.
That is why the fresh talk of suspending fuel excise taxes, and even the VAT on petroleum and others, sounds attractive. It promises quick relief, and when oil turns cruel, quick relief matters. But once government says it may lose tens of billions, the old question returns: if the state must give up revenue to let ordinary people breathe, why does the sacrifice almost always start with the tax base that touches everyone, while the deepest pockets remain a sensitive topic?
The latest debate is not really about oil alone. It is about who gets asked to absorb pain in a country where pain is already unevenly distributed.
That is why the idea of a wealth tax refuses to die, and frankly, it should not be dismissed with a bored shrug. Economist and former NEDA chief Winnie Monsod has argued for taxing extreme wealth, not ordinary savings, with proposals generally aimed at net assets above very high thresholds, such as P1 billion, and at rates low enough to bite without pretending to be a firing squad.
Some estimates tied to versions of the proposal have placed possible collections from a billionaire tax in the hundreds of billions of pesos, while even the narrower thought experiment of taxing only a small circle of the richest families produces sizable sums. Those numbers attract attention because the country is not exactly short on concentrated wealth. Forbes reported that the combined wealth of the country’s 50 richest reached $86 billion (P4.9 trillion) in 2025.
In plainer language, there is enough money at the top to make the phrase “there is no money” sound selective, not absolute. The appeal of the idea is moral, yes, but it is also practical: if prices are rising because fuel and transport costs crawl into everything from fish to notebooks, then shifting more of the tax burden upward is at least worth serious study, not instant ridicule.
The fairness argument is not difficult to understand, even without a degree in economics. Consumption taxes are paid in fragments, but they accumulate like a headache. A teacher commuting from a town to campus does not receive a letter saying, “Dear Ma’am, today you have been regressed upon.” She just pays more for fare, then more for food, then more for printing, then quietly postpones buying a new pair of shoes.
Meanwhile, wealth often sits in land, stocks, corporate structures, and appreciated assets that grow while their owners sleep. OECD analysis notes that capital income and assets are highly concentrated at the top, and that many tax systems still treat capital more favorably than labor. At home, that imbalance is not hard to feel. Salaried employees are taxed before the money even warms their hands, while the very wealthy can legally arrange holdings, timing, transfers, and exemptions with the help of people whose business card probably costs more than a week of jeepney rides. That is why a wealth tax resonates with many of us. It sounds less like punishment and more like a simple correction to a tax culture that is often strict with payroll and timid with accumulated power.
Still, honesty requires saying what advocates sometimes say too softly: wealth taxes are not magic, and critics are not inventing their concerns out of thin air. OECD work has been clear that many countries abandoned recurrent net wealth taxes because they were hard to administer, raised relatively little in some cases, and sometimes created distortions, especially when layered on top of weak capital income taxation or poorly designed exemptions.
The Department of Finance has also warned that such a tax could encourage avoidance, create valuation disputes, and even push capital outward if designed badly. Executive Secretary and former Finance chief Ralph Recto has more recently signaled little appetite for new taxes in general.
These objections deserve more than eye-rolling. It is genuinely difficult to value private companies, hidden offshore assets, art, land portfolios, and interlocking corporate claims every year. A rich person’s wealth is not always a vault of cash. Sometimes it is paper, leverage, control, and timing.
That matters. A clumsy law can end up dramatic in speeches and disappointing in collections. A serious wealth tax, if ever adopted, would have to be built for the Philippine reality, not copied from slogans and not stitched together in committee during a moral panic. (To be continued)/PN
