Lessons from SONA 4

Listening to our President’s one hour and some State of the Nation Address (SONA) last Monday, I realized that there were a lot of things that I was hearing for the first time. Here are the significant ones: On the money given to poor families that allows them to send their children to school: “The over 700,000 household beneficiaries we found upon coming into office in 2010 have now grown to almost 4 million households in the three years of our administration. . . According to research conducted by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, compared with those who only finished the elementary level, the income of high school graduates is 40 percent higher.”