OFFBEAT MAIL

Time and again, some public officials have dipped their hands in the murky world of graft and corruption, if only to gain something out of their sensitive positions in high government offices. The anomalous multi-million NBN-ZTE broadband scandal is not the first attempt to make the national government suffer for the ineptitude and insensitiveness of some public officials whose motives are only to make money at the expense of the millions of poor taxpayers who pay their taxes honestly without a choice, while the rich and the influentials get away with it. For many years now, the World Bank keeps on complaining on some of the inefficiencies of the national government in terms of collecting the much-needed revenues to finance the government expenditures, one of which is the repayment of past due loans and infrastructural developments in the countryside. In fact, it has made a series of studies on how the Philippine government fared in so far as the strengthening of its economic fundament

Mixed emotions have taken their toll on the role players, immediate family members and critics after the controversial and anomalous NBN-ZTE scandal erupted in the country's political atmosphere. Not to be outfaced is the involvement of the Catholic Church in the scandal, that eventually resulted in the exchange of ginger shots between a popular running priest and a bishop in Nueva Ecija over ABS-CBN's early Friday morning program hosted by Mr. Anthony Taberna. Finally, Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Joselito Atienza admitted that he was the one who called up over the phone PNP Chief Avelino Razon to request police security for ZTE key witness Rodolfo Lozada. Atienza said that he acted on his own after Lozada, being an executive of a government-controlled corporation under his department, had sought his help to ensure that the key witness would not be harmed when he arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, after a week-long trip in Hong Kong. While abroad

Long-term fiscal outlook of the federal government remains essentially unsustainable, despite some improvements in the annual deficit estimate for this fiscal year, says the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its latest report. In view of this scenario, GAO has predicted that the fiscal policies of the federal government may be impacted by the ever-longer deficits which could possibly lead to debt burdens to run out of control. These findings were based on GAO's latest simulations of two alternative fiscal paths using baseline extended option and an alternative based on recent trends and policy preferences. "Under these alternative assumptions, discretion by spending grows with the economy during the first ten years, most of which go to Medicare physician payments," GAO reported. Under the current law, Medicare payments to physicians have not been reduced and revenues are brought to their current level. In order to sustain this growth path, physician payments are