Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
— American social reformer Frederick Douglass
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) announced the other day what would be one of the greatest social achievements of the Marcos Jr. administration—if it were true, indeed.
In its announcement, the PSA disclosed that the number of poor Filipinos fell from 17.54 million in 2023 to 11.08 million in 2025, a reduction of 6.46 million people in only two years. This means that poverty incidence among individuals dropped from 15.5 percent to 9.7 percent while among families it fell from 10.9 percent to 6.4 percent.
But we don’t this credible enough to believe.
Actually, from our view, this presents a deeply misleading, if not false, picture of the state of our nation, which borders on disseminating ‘fake’ news.
What the PSA claims is that 6.5 million Filipinos moved from below to above the very artificial poverty threshold the government had invented years ago. What’s glaring here is that this has not established that 6.5 million Filipinos ceased being poor, in the ordinary meaning of that word. At best, the number of our poor remained unchanged and probably even worsened since this corruption-riddled administration under President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. came to power.
However, despite the doubts, news about the poverty rate going done hit the headlines, with one distinguished broadsheet bannering ‘6.5 million Filipinos lifted out of poverty’ while another published it as ‘PSA: PH poverty hit lowest single-digit level in 2025’.
The fallacy in both banner headlines is stating that “6.5 million of Filipinos have been lifted out of poverty.” These border on ‘fake’ news because the reality is that 6.5 million Filipinos were not lifted out from the poor conditions they have suffered and stayed in for decades.
And economic planning secretary Arsenio Balisacan cannot simply explain how that many Filipinos became non-poor in just two years.
What with our GDP growth rate slowing down from 6.4 percent in 2023 to only 4.4 percent in 2025. No new industries or growth areas has also emerged and business process outsourcing (BPO) has likewise slowed down and online gaming has been closed for quite a time.
How could this happen?
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