We fail to comprehend, why such an important financial policy maker like the Finance Minister had to announce a ruthless budget – which in every capacity would discourage domestic and foreign investments as well as prevent people from investing in fixed deposits because of disproportionate higher tax returns. This is the Eleventh National Budget that has now been announced by the current Finance Minister, and in fact very few Finance Ministers elsewhere get such a distinctive opportunity. However, it’s more than sad that in reality he actually learnt little, so to feel the pulse of the people and their financial reality. It may well have been the government’s innumerable development and communications infrastructure projects which are in need of urgent financing, but for that reason the Finance Minister cannot randomly start to extort the public in the name of higher VAT or irrational taxing. We fear, such anti-people and pro-money-making policy will distant the government from the people. It already has.
Moreover, the Finance Minister’s declaration for awarding high tax-payers as ‘Kor-Bahadur’ is another sign of cruelty and sarcasm. What needs a clear understanding here, is that the hardworking Middle-Class Bangladeshi has little craving for such comical awards. At the end of the day he or she wants to save some of his earnings for himself and his children’s future days ahead. He desires to own a small property so to shelter him and his family. That said – the new budget with its horrendous amounts of tax rates from all legal sources of income leaves no room for savings.
More importantly, the new budget has almost no emphasis for punishing the plunderers of public money. It has clearly granted a silent impunity to the countless unaccountable and dubious importers and businessmen – whereas it should have been these people from whom the government could have earned much of its unpaid revenues in the past. It’s also time for rewarding such questionable tax evaders as ‘thief-bahadur’ too.
Moreover, instead of imposing such extortion-like methods for collecting revenue, the Minister should have attempted to bring more tax-payers under its tax payers’ net. Additionally, there is a clear disparity between the rising size of the planned budget and its actual implementation. Decisions on the National Budget require greater political consensus and need to be backed by evidence-based research and regular monitoring. According to a number of think-tanks and experts this criterion was missing while the budget was planned.
More technically, the accounting frame of the proposed budget, like its previous ones, has been once again drawn along the routine lines, delineating the sources from where resources or funds would be coming and to where the same would be going. Details of every head of account on both receipts and expenditure sides are provided therein. This is the budgetary ‘number game’ and here the attention has unfailingly been given to keeping budget deficit – the gap between the projected overall expenditure and the estimated aggregate revenue and other receipts – within the limit of 5.0 percent. That ‘arithmetical’ exercise has, quite expectedly, been carried out meticulously in the proposed budget on an incremental basis, from both sides – receipts and expenditures.
Budget is not an experimental sport to be applied on the public; it should be pragmatic and realistic where the people’s expectations are reflected. However, the latest budget only reflects on the current government’s desperate and irrational attempts for squeezing money from those who can offer least. It’s sad to see that our financial policy makers to have presented a budget which is not people-oriented and is more to hold people hostage financially.
