By Ben Pangelinan
For Variety

“THOSE who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” There are many variations of the saying, but the earliest version is probably that of the poet and philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Husband and wife and writers Will and Ariel Durant, as a follow-up to their monumental life’s work, The Story of Civilization, wrote the much less voluminous, but equally important work, The Lessons of History. It surveyed human history and extracted the great ideas and great events that can help us understand our own era.
For politicians it really should not be hard to avoid the mistakes of the past, since we only need to remember the recent past—maybe just the past year, two, three and if we stretch it the past five years, to avoid mistakes. Certainly our short-term memory cannot be that bad. Nor can we plead the effects of aging on memory in such a short time.
Yet, it seems that is exactly what we have here with the submission of the 2008 fiscal year budget. Increase the revenues in the face of declining collections. Let us do the same as we did in the last budget.
When it comes to the budget, the first lesson we need to remember is that if you do not have the money, you should not spend it. With the new budget, it appears that this is the first lesson we forgot. At a recent hearing, administration officials testified that our revenue projections for the current budget are higher than our revenue collections. We are taking in less money than we planned. Yet, we did not get a report on how we have adjusted our spending. Have we adjusted them and reduced them to fall in line with the cash we are collecting? Since the government is operating on a modified cash accrual basis, we must do this if we are to prevent our deficit from increasing.
It really should not be hard to remember this lesson. Everyday we hear our citizens on the radio reminding us of this lesson. Senator Rory Respicio has repeatedly asked the Legislature and the administration to act on the reality of the situation, but to no avail.
The Legislature has made sure that we are sent the workbooks for our lesson plan every single month. As required in the budget law, we receive reams upon reams of reports detailing the expenditures and the revenue collected by our government. The question we must ask is what are we doing with all this information. You would think that we are approaching information overload. Now we have another bill for another report and the submission of a plan to act. Not act, mind you, but just a plan to act. What legacy will we leave behind with our inaction?
When our time is past and our children seek their own lesson of history from our era, seeking in the work we do today, the great ideas that can help them understand their own era, what will they find? Will they only find our follies and crimes caused by our refusal to learn our lessons or will we leave a spacious place of the mind and soul, where citizen statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers live and speak, teach and carve and sing?
This can only happen from lessons learned well and action timely taken.
(Ben Pangelinan is a senator in the 29th Guam Legislature and a former speaker now serving in his seventh term in the Guam Legislature. E-mail comments or suggestions to: senbenp@guam.net or ctzenben@ite.net.)