Is Budget 2008-09 Pro Pakistan?
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I went through the long list of things that our government of the People (or PPP) presented to the nation and my instant response was to throw away the whole budget into the dustbin (or the minister) for keeping so many things obscure and providing full room for corruption while with his new extra taxes, he is surely going to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the middle and poor class of our society. Can he just tell me what was the pro poor things in this budget? Regularizing Grade 1-5 people and increasing the pension is the only achievement they can show to us? Everything else seemed pro corruption and anti Pakistan to me. Moreover, i was also amazed at the Benazir Card, Benazir Fund and Benazir this and that! I won’t have been surprised if he suggested a change of name for Pakistan to Benaziristan because she garlanded us with Zardari who robbed us in 90’s and am sure won’t spare us this time as well. This is again ridiculous that the government want to construct one million low cost housing units in the country. At one end they increase the price of cement while on the other hand they want to create 1 million housing units. I wonder from where they import this special brain to make a budget. If this is what they call a budget, i think its a National Shame! Increase in import duties on luxury cars while in reality it is just to support our selected families who own local car manufacturing companies and who cant face any competition despite robbing the middle class Pakistani’s for past so many decades. So many support funds are a strong indicator of upcoming corruption. The increase in the Supreme Court judges was another thing that came as surprise to me. We have already ransacked the most competent judges and want to retire them early while on the other hand we think we are short on judges and hence want to hire new ones. Are we all insane? What the poor has to do with the new judges when he can’t get justice? When our citizens are handed over to Americans to be mutilated in Guantanamo and his family can’t even come out to protest, what am i going to do with even 1000 Supreme Court judges? We need justice and not extra judges who will in return enjoy benefits at our expense. The increase in Sales Tax from 15% to 16% was another great pro Poor step of our government because they want to eliminate poverty by simply killing them. And look at the confidence of our dummy Prime Minister who gave his speech about Defence Budget just two days before the budget and promised to reduce the military budget while in reality it increased by Rs. 20 billion. What a confident liar we have as our Prime Minister that even Bush wants to take some crash courses from him. To summarize it is that to me the Budget is nothing but just a collection of lies and false promises and it is not Pro Pakistan at all! Highlights can be found below (thanks to Jang Group)
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Has budget ever been Pro Pakistan?
lol! nopes
[...] able to extract some facts about Budget here M. Junaid Khan Discusses some ins and outs of Budget here, PTA has collection of some data about Telecom’s contribution towards National Economy [...]
[...] able to extract some facts about Budget here M. Junaid Khan Discusses some ins and outs of Budget here, PTA has collection of some data about Telecom’s contribution towards National Economy [...]
this is bullshit. That pseudo-FM should go be sent to high school.
every year budget after implement when budget impliment every year not to bound to companey to pay their loabour to fixed govt but i want to this time govt to take positivly.
> Sales tax raised to 16% from 15%
> Import duty raised to 100% from 90% on luxury cars.
> Import duty raised from 30% to 35% on 300 luxury items.
Increasing tax for a couple of hundred luxury import products hardly has any impact on macro economic behaviour, I guess the goal is to protect internal markets with those taxes.
But there are serious side effects in increasing tax that should not be taken lightly. Any economy student familiair with the work of John Maynard Keynes knows how tax changes greatly influence the behaviour, production and consumption of man. There’s a lot to consider.
What I know from reading newspapers is that when the regular sales tax goes up with a percent (up to 16 %) it is likely that most prices will go up a little more higher than a percent (like up to 17,5 %). Shops will recalculate prices they tag their products with once tax increases, and that usually is a bit more than the tax increase. If you don’t increase wages then extra sales tax will lead to less consumption, which could be seriously damaging to markets that are under pressure already.
I was just wondering if in Pakistan there is only one sales tax percentage to apply? In my country we have three rates for sales tax:
0% - for trading abroad, foreign countries
6% - for food, healthcare, books
19% - for all other, regular sales tax
Where I live we will add another percent to the high rate next year too (change the 19% rate into a 20% rate). However, the lower rate remains the same (6%). That way all products that are needed for food and medicine do not change in price.
Altough the budget has many flaws but as far as i think the government these days is not interested in increasing the growth or aggregate demand.
The first and foremost concern of gov. is to contain the inflation and in this regard they have revised the monetary policy and presented further tighting directives. As all economics students must know that making changes only in the monetary policy does not give fruitful effects but the fiscal policy should be in accordence with that. If they would have tightened the monetary policy and on the other hand would have showed an increase in aggregate demand by giving subsidies or by any other means, then the tight monetary policy would altough be effective for the short term but in the long run the inflation would have further risen.
For Pakistan the Threshold inflation rate is calculated at 9% and in order to achieve that growth should be slowed down in every means.