By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Thank you, Mr. President. Not only did you suspend the excise tax on kerosene and LPG (or cooking gas) this week, but you also gave working Filipinos a grace period to settle their taxes.
The extension of the 2025 annual income tax return (ITR) filing deadline from April 15 to May 15 surely does more than buy time. Effectively, it lowers the cost of compliance since the ITR is a full-year accounting of income, deductions, and the final tax due or refundable.
By moving the deadline, the government effectively removes a month’s worth of potential penalties and surcharges for late or incomplete filings, giving taxpayers room to gather documents and file accurately through the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR)’s electronic channels or authorized banks.
In a time when fuel prices have surged, transport fares are biting deeper into daily wages, and even basic goods are inching up on the back of a 4.1% inflation rate, leaving families to stretch every peso from fare to food, that matters.
And so, the suspension of excise on liquefied petroleum gas and kerosene is another wise targeted price intervention. Excise is a fixed tax layered onto fuel; take it out and retail prices can ease almost immediately for households that cook with LPG or rely on kerosene.
To critics who have been trying to block the suspension of the oil tax — yes, it doesn’t resolve broader fuel inflation, but it offers quick, direct relief where it is most felt: in the kitchen and at home.
The excise remains intact for diesel and gasoline. That’s why prices remain sky-high despite a significant rollback last Tuesday — the first one since the global supply shock we’re struggling with since the US-Israel war with Iran broke out and spread chaos and tension across oil-producing Arab states.
I heard somewhere it took a lot of high-pitched face-to-face scowling from a work-from-home Cabinet member to bamboozle oil company executives into ensuring a big-time rollback was in place this week.
And for those social media know-it-all posers who have spent the past week manufacturing Stage 4 illnesses and calling real journalists “bayaran” — here’s an antidote to your tall tales. Not only is Bongbong Marcos doing jumping jacks in the street and at his own live press conference, but he’s made two of the best decisions he’s ever made during a crisis this week.
Sorry to those who wish him dead and speculate he is a “dead man walking, but these two decisions — moving the tax filing deadline and suspending the excise on critical oil products — are hard evidence that the President is alive, working, and governing.
Contrast that with the political theater we have seen elsewhere: public officials delivering rambling or “meow-ing” in the middle of disjointed statements that raise more questions than answers; others disappearing from public view when they’re paid to attend Congress; still others turning governance into spectacle, mistaking volume for substance. It says something about our discourse when proof of life becomes a rebuttal to propaganda.
But here we are. Two concrete measures, one clear message: the President is not only present — he is, by all visible accounts, in good health and sound in body and mind.
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