Blistering Barnacles! It's those Blithering Budgets again!

Picking up this months issue of Business Goa, I perused Prakash Kamat’s “bird’s eye view” of Goa’s additional budget for 2009-10, and harkened back to the one presented at the centre in July; immediately after which the markets tanked. I noticed with pride and pleasure a marked similarity in both budgets – neither made any fiscal sense.

So while we play “Here- we- go- round- the- Budget- Bush” again, I imagine many of you readers, especially the ones with smaller brains, are still eagerly awaiting my annual guide to how you should handle your fiscal deficits for the rest of the year - not counting alimony payouts.

Listening to Pronob (A phor apple, B phor Bhejetoble )Mukherjee made me realize what a crashing bore he is; it also made me realize that if I went around looking for an interpreter to translate the Budget and decipher all those acronyms such as MAT, FBT,GST,FRBM,UID and FRBM I would end up losing money in the process, by having to shell out service tax AND education cess to a government which neither provides any service, and collectively, has all the education of the primary section of a school of village idiots.

Those of you who fortunately read my column last year where I advised you to cheat and give less money to the government, thereby helping reduce government spending… no wait! That was the year before. Last year was spent trying to find my stockbroker and I profoundly apologise for disappointing my loyal fans who look forward to my annual tax-advice article.

Anyway I’m proud to report that many of you went all out to support the Prime Minister, and re-elected him, and I’m sure he will thank every one of you personally... once global oil prices go down and the stock market goes up, or he finds out who has been messing with his turbans.

In the meantime we have an entirely new budget. This year Pronob Babu needs all the money he can get, because when going over the figures with his finance secretaries Santa Singh and Banta Singh, they noticed that the government was going to be short by something like 6.8 % of GDP (which means that the government wants to spend more and more money by giving all the babus increased salaries once again, and buy additional exploding devices to defend you with)

I’m not kidding, in a show of great unity and camaraderie Diggu K. (taking time off from his busy schedule of inaugurating new bathrooms in Government buildings, along with longtime opponent Manu P. (who also deferred inaugurating a couple of questionable beauty parlours) unanimously passed a proposal for MLA’s in the Goa Legislative Assembly, with cheers all around as follows :

Daily Allowance: hike from 750 to 1000 when on duty (Huh?? When ARE these guys on duty?)

Assembly sitting fees: 300 to 700 (Shouldn’t it be sleeping fees?)

Housing Advance hike: 12 lakh to 30 lakh (Can’t they just house them in the assembly? They sleep there anyway!)

Constituency Allowance: 26000 to 55000 (Said constituents being their family and relatives)

Four Personal Assistants: 18000 per month to 32000 per month (not including file-forwarding “fees”)

Meanwhile Dr. Tamba’s 19 contract staff; hired to deal with the H1N1 swine flu have been told that there are no funds to pay their salaries any more , much less to treat patients…..at the time of publishing this I hear Dr.Tamba has been conveniently replaced with his compounder, and transferred to some unknown location for being a whistle blower.

But this year we have a new tax plan. The government is ecstatic about raising taxes once again. It believes that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Income Tax Department. So since time immemorial governments have seen the importance of taking money away from the public.

See, if you were allowed to keep the money you would not spend it on the maintenance of your local MLA’s children’s education at Harvard, or to pay off his debts at the Casinos. You’d just use it to buy another cow or something. But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs.

In this case the government will spend crores of rupees in a major security program, creating new factories to manufacture high security registration plates for all vehicles in the country.Examples from Karnataka given below which require either 1) A multi-lingual ability or 2) A portable bar code reader.

This will not only ensure that, in the event of you being carjacked, your car can only be sold for spare parts; it will also create a new auctioneering forum for collectors of antique registration plates.

The government will also spend lakhs of rupees on a major publicity campaign, for television and newspaper ads that go like this:

TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER ......and the Department of Transportation are pleased to announce that for the next 75 kilometers there will be road blocks all over the place and hundreds of relatives of a contractor who manufactures high security registration plates in the factory premises owned by……. TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER standing around with lathis and red flags and directing traffic so casually that they may occasionally direct your car into an oncoming tanker loaded with LPG, so please bear with us ,we regret the inconvenience, but as…….. TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER pointed out when he flew in by government helicopter to make a speech taking credit for the 3-year long ongoing 102.37 crore landslide repair project at Porvorim NH 17, we cannot allow our national highways to deteriorate especially ones that will provide access to land which will be grabbed by…….. TRANSPORT MINISTER RAM “DAHI” LICKER

The best way to look at this whole issue is to understand what the government does: It takes away money from a few people, keeps a major chunk of it, and then gives away the rest to other people.

So basically you will find that there are two types if people in India: A) People who pay more to the government than they can ever hope to get from it, i.e. the taxpayers. B) People who get more from the government than they give to it: Politicians, elected governments officials, rich farmers, government contractors, arms brokers, government employees, statue sculptors.

So, if you are an ordinary taxpayer, the only way this annual tax-advice column of mine need really concern you is for you to be aware that: In some way or the other the government is going to waste more and more of your money; the question is, where is it going?