Can’t be acceptable
He’s bound to be nervous already. In a little more than a month’s time, Dr Hafeez Shaikh is to become the most talked about individual in the country. Because, on one fateful day, he is going to have to present the federal budget to the national assembly. It’s a dreadful, dreadful exercise. Because even though the government does some chest thumping about all the good work it has supposedly done, the opposition party has a field day. So does the media. Regardless of how well-drafted a budget is, how meticulously planned it is, how good it tries to make lemonade out of lemons, it is going to be trashed endlessly.
This stems from The Economic Problem. There is only one, really. All economic science covers variations of it. How to spend limited resources to best achieve unlimited wants. The framing of the problem explicitly admits there will be much left wanting. Try telling that to the self-styled economics pundits on TV. These polymaths (now experts on Lyari gang warfare, now Siachen, the contempt of court issue a little bit later, and whatever works a little bit after that) are going to leave no stone unturned to bemoan how the government isn’t giving “relief” to the “common man.”
In Pakistan’s case, the opposition and the mainstream media, each more populist than the other, tries to ensure the government does not increase those limited wants. By making it next to impossible to reform the taxation structure. To make it worse, as opposed to the lower-taxes lobby in the west, those opposing tax reforms in the country aren’t arguing for lower taxes but are opposing a system that continues to make it easy to cheat on them.
Another plea: that the poor man is being crushed under the weight of taxation. Wrong again. There are going to be only two taxes in the upcoming budget: sales tax and income tax. The latter exempts anyone earning a monthly income that is less than, roughly, Rs. 30,000. That’s way into the middle-class. No, but the poor pay sales taxes. Wrong again. The bulk of what the poor spend their money on is food and shelter. Both items are exempt from sales tax.
The human resource of the mainstream media is culled from the middle-classes and the owners are the elite. Come budget-time, anything that affects adversely these demographics is going to be opposed, to hell with the poor!