Talking business

Something happens when the same message is repeated too many times.  The mind becomes a little numb to its importance and the message gradually enters that temple of common sense where all good ideas go to die.

I saw this happen during the George Bush re-election campaign of 2004.  Two disclosures had shaken his campaign and indeed his presidency to the core.  One was the disclosure that there were plenty of intelligence warnings about the 9/11 attacks that had been ignored, including the memo from August 2001 titled “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States.”  The other was the prisoner abuse photographs at Abu Ghraib.

As the outrage mounted and television commentary, newspaper columns and the entire edifice of public discourse slowly swiveled against the president’s wars, the Republicans returned with a cunning strategy of their own.

“What’s the outrage of the week?” they started asking, totally trivialising the concerns being raised about the direction of the war and about the strong ideological blindness of the president and his advisors.  Instead they addressed their counterattack almost entirely to the forms of the argument, the tone in which the debate was being carried out.

All this happened around June 2004 and by November the Republicans had successfully turned the tide back in the President’s favour, enough to win the election.  Casual and stylised disregard for pressing and momentous issues had carried the day.  Never underestimate the power of casual disregard when it comes to dealing with the biggest issues of your time!

Today, memories of those days are rekindled in my mind.  Not because of anything happening in America.  I am reminded of the power of casual disregard when I hear our foreign minister telling members of the so-called Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP) that his government intends to implement tax reform, but “it will take time.”

One feels like speaking through clenched teeth to remind this most casual of men in high office, that, “Mr Minister:  You don’t have any more time!”

Issues like tax reform are bleak but nonetheless require sustained attention in Pakistan today.  It was George Bush’s monumental travesty against millennia of accumulated wisdom to wage two large scale wars abroad while pushing through a tax cut for wealthy patrons of his regime at home.

As the Romans had discovered, war and taxes go hand in hand.  But hard as the level-headed amongst them screamed about this travesty, it was futile to try and awaken the rabble to the importance of tax reform.

It’s only slightly different here.  We’ve lived against the accumulated wisdom of the millennia for almost 60 years now.  It was a lesson the Mughals learned the hard way: if you cannot raise the revenues to support your government, your country will not be yours to govern for very long.

Of course neither Aurangzeb nor his quarrelsome successors had recourse to an international system like today’s, where you could raise capital through bilateral channels, float bonds in global markets or simply print currency to pay your bills and not worry about the consequences.

At the FoDP conference in Brussels last week, a message of monumental importance was passed before our foreign minister.  Here it was in simple language:  help yourself first before you ask us for help.  Tax your citizens first before you ask our citizens for their tax dollars.

But it seems from the response of our foreign minister, and the rest of his political colleagues, that casual disregard is the only response they know to give to such exhortations.

After all, tax reform only makes for good politics when one can mount the soap box to denounce it.  The force with which the message has been repeated by our friends abroad now runs the risk of numbing the political elite here.

The whole idea of reform could find its way to that temple of common sense and take its place next to all other great ideas, such as making peace with India, bringing efficiency to our water sector and diversifying our fuel mix for power generation – ideas that echo forever within the walls of the pantheon never to find a way to becoming reality.

the writer is Editor Business and Economic policy for Express News and Express 24/7

Published in The Express Tribune, October 18^th, 2010.