Unless there is political will exhibited by the present ruling elite, this is all a waste of time
LAHORE: The season of budget seminars and setting targets for growth and exports to bridge the ever-widening gap between taxes and GDP is back. This has been an exercise in futility for the past three decades, setting utopian targets without the enforcement of financial discipline and an effective powerful direct tax collection system that punishes tax evasion, which is considered a crime against the state. Unless there is political will exhibited by the present ruling elite, this is all a waste of time. Name one year in the past three decades where the FBR’s direct tax collection targets have been achieved and the failure to accomplish targets penalised. More revenue has been wasted in advertising tax amnesty schemes than tax collected through them.
A country that bases its budget upon foreign remittances, rather than tax collection and rise in exports and growth in socio-economic sectors, is a nation destined to doom and gloom. In the presence of laws where individuals are allowed to transfer through banking channels almost the equivalent received through foreign remittances by expatriate workers, there is bound to be an ever-growing deficit. This has led to more debt with the country caught in this vicious cycle of taking more loans to pay back loans, putting at stake state sovereignty. Today, there are too many paid public office-holders involved in making policy decisions, which decide the fate of millions, that have a conflict of interest, with no stakes in this country. In 1947, the Quaid-e-Azam, through a political struggle, managed to free us from foreign occupation, which started with Robert Clive’s East India Company, only to be replaced within a few years of Jinnah’s death with a new East India Company. This new company was and is managed by brown natives who have pledged an oath of loyalty to foreign countries, or those who have no faith in this country, which they consider worthy only to rule, but unfit for their families to live in or their assets to be located within.
Malik Tariq Ali
Published in The Express Tribune, May 25th, 2016.
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