Undersecretary Abigail Valte, deputy presidential spokesperson, told a press briefing last Tuesday that President Benigno Aquino III has rejected the proposed P125 legislated wage hike for minimum earners. Valte told her audience that upon consulting Aquino about the proposal Tuesday morning, he presented to them a computation showing that employers will be shelling out P42,250 for the salary increase of each employee. Showing a slide with the calculations, the Palace people got this figure by multiplying P125 by 26 days and multiplied the result further by 13 months. They added that this P42,250 multiplied by 38 million workers in the country would result in expenditures for employees of P1.6 trillion (mistakenly written as 1,605,500,000 trillion [or 1.6 billion trillion] in their slide).

LAST week, news reports carried the announcement of Education Secretary Armin Luis-tro that Science would be dropped from the subjects being taught at the Grade 1 level. This decision of the Department of Education (DepEd) is based on the design of the K+12 curriculum and the department’s efforts to decongest the Basic Education Curriculum. Instead of Science, the Grade 1 curriculum will focus on “oral fluency” and include learning areas on the Mother Tongue, Filipino, Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao, MAPEH (Music, Art, Physical Education and Health), Mathematics, Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies) and English. Science will be introduced as a subject only when the student comes in at Grade 3.

I HAD hoped that a previous column on oil prices would have been the last but with local gasoline prices increasing upwards 15 times already this year alone (2011), answering the question of how to put the brakes on skyrocketing oil prices becomes imperative. Oil firms and government are singing the same tune as to the supposed reason for the increases: that it is the world market that dictates oil prices and that we are essentially helpless in this regard.