Our youth are not indifferent; they care. Recently, young Filipino health advocates wrote and sent letters to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ahead of his State of the Nation Address on July 27. Roughly 20 letters, handwritten and earnest, carried a single refrain: nutrition is an investment, and the health of the young cannot wait for another administration.
A youth leader, speaking about the human cost of alcohol-related harm, said that the pain caused by drinking is never just a number. It has a face, a name, and a family that will mourn for the rest of its life. He was referring, in part, to a 27-year-old public school teacher killed in Marikina last month by a drunk driver. Somewhere in Marikina, a classroom will have an empty desk in front, and no government spreadsheet will be able to explain that absence to a young student.
We tend to discuss sin taxes as fiscal instruments, line items that fatten the national budget, or measures that our legislators reach for when they need money for their programs. That framing isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete.
The coalition behind this year’s appeal is asking for something already sitting on Congress’s docket. Albay Rep. Cielo Krisel Lagman and Bataan Rep. Antonino Roman III have filed bills raising excise taxes on alcohol by up to 25 percent annually through 2030, projected to generate roughly P41 billion a year, most of it earmarked for public health. Companion measures would push levies on sweetened beverages from six pesos to P20 per liter, and on high-fructose corn syrup from P12 to P40, closing exemptions currently enjoyed by flavored milk and sweetened coffee. Former Finance Undersecretary Cielo Magno, who has watched these debates from inside the Department of Finance for years, calls this the lowest-hanging fruit available to the President, a rare policy that helps the budget, the health system, and a generation at once.
Their argument makes a lot of sense because sin taxes are administratively cheap, they are progressive in effect because they target discretionary vice consumption rather than food staples, and unlike most revenue measures, they change behavior even before the peso is collected. Every year we delay indexing these rates to inflation, industry recovers the ground we gained. Magno makes this point bluntly: smoking and drinking rates rising again is itself proof that the current rates have gone stale.
There is also a slower, less visible cost that rarely makes it into budget hearings: stunting. Youth advocates flagged this for anyone who thinks child nutrition is not an economic issue. Children who experience stunting fall behind in school, show underdeveloped cognitive capacity, and face elevated risk of turning to smoking, drinking, or vaping later. It is a closed loop of disadvantage, and revenue from this can, if we are honest and disciplined, fund the intervention programs.
Health taxes will draw fierce industry lobbying, as they always have, dressed up as concern for jobs and small sari-sari stores. Those concerns deserve honest engagement, but the President has, in Magno’s phrase, a chance to claim a policy with multiple wins attached to his name before his term draws to a close. Whether that appears in his SONA on the 27th will tell us a great deal about whose letters this administration actually reads.