P500 for Noche Buena Might Have Been Okay in 1990—Not 2025

(SPOT.ph) Pasko na naman, and with it come the lights, lechon, and—apparently—some of the most bonkers insinuations about budgets and/or spending power.

No, we're not talking about the one from your tita who can't stand having a good thing to say about you.

The Department of Trade and Industry recently released a statement on their computation for, quote, "Noche Buena for a family of three"—a whopping P500.

Let’s start with the thing that’s staring us in the face: P500 is probably a great deal for a meal for two or three in a fast-food joint. It’s about two Grab rides in July at non-peak hours; that's four Grab rides up and down a major highway in a city like, say, Bacolod. If you’re incredibly adept at stretching a budget, it could buy groceries for one person, one week tops.

But when you widen that lens, P500 is still just a little bit less than one day’s pay if we’re going by the current set minimum wage (P695 for non-agricultural workers). An entire day of labor for a holiday meal for a small family sounds like a Dickens novel, before character development of any kind kicks in.

The other half of that statement that we have to address is that “family of three” business—the average Filipino nuclear family is 4 to 5 people. It may have been more prudent or realistic to base a budget off of that number, but we're sure none of you have forgotten a similar claim in 2018 that P10,000/month was “enough” for such a household (although this was later clarified to be a "hypothetical figure to demonstrate the effects of inflation"). Ernesto Pernia, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary at the time, then put forth that the ideal figure "for survival" should actually be P42,000.

That’s not even mentioning the underlying disrespect to the cultural significance of the Noche Buena. The very nature of it—its rarity, narrative, and role in Filipino community-building—warrants festivity in every sense of the word. To deny a population any gaiety, to even suggest austerity in a time of celebration, is to say that there are two Christmases, and that only some get the good one.

Just given the cold facts—that P500 in 1990 (the release year of "Christmas In Our Hearts," of course) could buy the equivalent of about P3,500 today, and almost thrice that only eleven years prior in 1979—speak to the rate of inflation in the Philippines, of which corruption is widely considered to be a major factor.

Just in case you still somehow have relatives who will defend whatever's fed to them no matter what, allow us to give you the A-to-B so you can shut that train(wreck) of thought down—guaranteed to make a tense Noche Buena at your or your tita's house, but at least you'll be right.

"Corruption" as a word can be kind of a dark catch-all; you know it's bad, you know you're not doing it, but that also might be because you wouldn't know how to start. No one's walked up to you in the office and said, "Hey! It's a great Monday for embezzling, isn't it?"

You can laugh. It's a ridiculous scenario, but when you boil things down, it's exactly that: a bunch of people agreeing to steal money on the low, in barrels, year-round. In our case, it's our taxes; money that we earn for better or worse (and most of you reading this make far more than the mentioned minimum wage), a growing chunk of which we're legally required to give up. That chunk is not for nothing—however much we give up, we should expect it to be spent on things that improve our collective quality of life: education, nutrition, sanitation, infrastructure, and even cultural preservation.

So it's a little wild for someone's uncle to claim he's sick of people "complaining about taxes," when it's your money, and you should be complaining. And you should be as upset as you are, if not more, that your money isn't going to real projects that would make a real difference on your street, in your city, or in your country.

It's in somebody's high-security vault, and no matter what that somebody does, you will never see that money again—not in bills, not in kind. If, in all that, "P500 is enough for Noche Buena" is all certain authorities have to say to the Filipino people, then maybe we're not complaining enough.

In the midst of breaking stories of budget scandals, public works ghost projects, runaway congressmen, and zero arrests, the idea of the average citizen being limited to P500 for three of anything is almost funny. But it is most definitely a script we literally can no longer afford to follow.