Senator Sonny Angara on Wednesday said the proposed 2022 national budget should provide the necessary items that would pave the way to national recovery from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Angara, who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, said President Duterte’s last budget request should “capture the urgency and the dimensions” of the economic recovery that he laid out during his final State of the Nation Address (SONA) last Monday.

“The budget puts the money where the rhetoric is,” Angara said.

“If dreams don’t get funded, they’ll remain as such. Historically, the post-SONA challenge is how to translate the language of the SONA into budget language,” the senator said.

"It (the 2022 budget) is the major downpayment we will be making for our hard and long road to recovery," he added.

The good thing, he said, is that there are already laws and programs that promote economic growth with social equity.

“Meron ng free college to train our youth. We now have the Universal Health Care (UHC law). On the economic front, we are retooling the way we do business, encourage start-ups, retain talent and attract investments in order to create good paying jobs for our people.”

He also said reform laws that President Duterte and his predecessors have advocated have become the foundation that hold the nation together in times of crisis.

These laws would also be the same ones the government can use "in climbing out of the pandemic we are in."

But Angara said things should be done as fast as possible because the window for opportunity may not stay open for long.”

“I think everything we do from hereon – vaccinating our people, spending the budget, safely reopening our schools, building infrastructure – should be done at warp speed,” he said.

“There are two ways of viewing a clock. You can count the time remaining and just coast along. Or work furiously and like those who travel to space, see it as a countdown to liftoff,” Angara stressed.