Fact: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer
Newsbreak reports that according to the government's own Family Income and Expenditures Survey (Fies), the net incomes of the top two deciles of the population grew by an average of 18.5 percent, while the net incomes of the bottom five deciles fell an average of 55 percent. The middle three deciles saw incomes grow by about 12 percent since 1997. In short, the poor are getting poorer; the rich are geeting richer.

As if this uneven distribution of growth were not bad enough, Newsbreak further reports that consumer trends seem to point out out that the Philippine middle class is actually shrinking:

Yolanda Villanueva Ong, chief executive of advertising agency Campaigns and Gray, believes that the middle class is getting smaller both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population. "This is being borne out in consumer and advertising trends. Clients who sell products that cater to middle-income consumers have noticed a decline in their sales over the years. Hence you see them increasingly rolling out products and variants aimed at the lower end, or mass market."

Ready for the real shocker?

Today some eight million Filipino citizens are living and working abroad. With the domestic middle class estimated at about 10 percent of the 80-million population, one can say that roughly half of the Philippines’ entire middle class lives outside the country.

Perhaps this is the reason why our politics is still under the quagmire of, pace Joma Sison, semi-feudalism: our middle class is abroad.

When Aristotle praised the median virtues of the middle classes two thousand years ago, he never said anything about their being overseas.