By Ellson Quismorio The House of Representatives' proposed multi-billion “Post-COVID Economic Stimulus Package”, which appears to have an ever-growing amount attached to it, has begun to move forward in the chamber. AAMBIS-OWA Party-list Rep. Sharon Garin, co-chair of the Economic Stimulus Cluster of the House Defeat COVID-19 Committee (DCC), bared Tuesday afternoon that the consolidated bill on the stimulus package is now ready to be presented to the mother committee. “Right now the total of this is P485 billion,” Garin, a former deputy speaker, told her fellow cluster members during a virtual meeting on videoconferencing app Zoom. “This is being presented. I think the procedure is to submit it to the mother committee so that the mother committee can hopefully pass it to the floor for interpellation, or approval, hopefully,” Garin happily reported to her colleagues. Incidentally, it was also the congresswoman's birthday Tuesday. “I really hope that we pass this as soon as we can. The sooner we pass it, the sooner that business owners will know that some help is going to arrive after ECQ (enhanced community quarantine),” she said. The mother DCC panel is co-chaired by House Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano and Majority Leader Martin Romualdez. The measure to be presented before the main panel is a consolidation of separate bills penned by Garin's co-cluster chairpersons Albay 2nd district Rep. Joey Salceda and Marikina City 2nd district Rep. Stella Quimbo. Both Salceda and Quimbo are economists. It was two weeks ago during a virtual technical working group (TWG) hearing of the same cluster that Quimbo first discussed details of a P370-billion economic stimulus package that was designed to help local businesses get back on their feet following the ECQ-induced work stoppage. Over the weekend, Salceda revealed that he, Quimbo, and Garin were actually looking to pass a P455-billion package for 2020. Broken down, the amount will include P380 billion in transitional measures and P75 billion worth of financial restructuring, he said. Then on Tuesday, Garin bared a bigger amount of P485 billion worth of economic intervention. The measure also took into account inputs from agencies and other stakeholders particularly from the economic sector, she further said during the meeting. Job-protection bill “First and foremost, we want to protect jobs. That is the mindset of the authors... The economic stimulus bill is a job-protection bill...we can't afford to have 30 million people lose their jobs,” she said. The 30 million refers to the daily wage earners or the so-called informal workers sector, which the cluster had identified as the most vulnerable amid the economic standstill. Also exposed to the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ECQ are the 17 million workers from the non-essential services sector and six million employees of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country. Garin underscored the importance of building consumer confidence through measures like the Post-COVID Economic Stimulus Package, saying it would allow businesses to flourish once a vaccine for COVID-19 is created. As a general intervention, Garin said the stimulus measure would allocate P20 billion annually for the purpose of mass testing, to be carried out either by the local government units (LGUs) or the Department of Health (DOH) and other agencies. Even establishments like hotels can do it, she said, so as to spread out the reach of testing. “Takot yung tao (People are afraid). So we have to build consumer confidence and testing can drastically help that. [This is P20 billion every year until we have the vaccines in place. Of course, it has to follow DOH protocols,” she pointed out. “If know that help is coming, I think that our economy would be more stable after ECQ,” added Garin.