Pakistan is an agricultural country and if the farmers are not burdened with high input costs including taxation, our country, despite being poor with an ever increasing population, is unlikely to suffer any famines as were commonly witnessed during colonial times when all wheat was whisked away to Europe. It is the non-availability of foreign currency that is our problem and is holding us in slavery to foreign powers. And unfortunately it is the policies that the much hackneyed IMF forces upon us that result in our ever decreasing ability to produce foreign exchange.
It’s one of the most prominent demands has been for constantly increasing taxation. High taxes always result in depression of the entrepreneurial spirit of a nation and it is especially true in our case where there are no real entrepreneurs to speak of. There is no incentive here to induce anyone to develop manufacturing companies that would produce exportable goods that should bring us foreign currency. Even the secondary form of energy, electricity, a sine qua non for industrial, agricultural, and personal life, is produced from imported primary sources of energy making the earning of foreign currency impossible.
The government must consider these problems most seriously and invite its own people with the right kind of wisdom to solve this basic problem. All this vituperation about our low tax-GDP ratio is only hypothetical because our population is largely illiterate and no records are available to correctly calculate our GDP. But the IMF is always guessing it on the higher side to blackmail our country.
MEHMOOD ALI
Muzaffargarh
