There’s no such thing as a perfect budget. There are simply too many people to please. Everyone wants their pound of flesh and the idea, one imagines, is to give a little all around. Of course it’s an election budget! What’s new! This is an election year (remember) and budgets are as much political tools as they are economic tools. The Private Sector Commission may have gone too far in its soppy press release that provides the kind of soundbite which propagandists dream of. But who can blame the private sector for their whooping and cheering the fact that their corporate taxes are down by five per cent? By the same token who can deny the nimbleness of wit of the market vendor who wondered aloud as to whether part of those savings on corporate taxes ought not to go to people like the security guards, cleaners and store attendants who work for the corporate people.
Numbers are funny things and the people who put the budget together know this. The thing to do is to make a great big fuss about the cumulative numbers the millions, tens of millions and hundreds of millions that go into adjusting the tax threshold and increasing old age pensions. What you steer clear of if you are presenting a budget, however, is what those numbers mean for the individual pensioner or the individual wage earner. Old age pensions of under ten thousand dollars are hardly anything to write home about particularly when, simultaneously, we hear talk about multi million dollar house lots being set aside for members of cabinet. As for the tax threshold, rising prices will probably take care of that even before the budget debate is over
Back to the budget as a political tool…it is about bragging rights and political posturing and carping criticism and a budget debate which, invariably, descends into comedy and catcalls across the floor and pure unadulterated pantomime. Which MP on any side of the house can honestly own up to not nodding off during the debate…out of sheer boredom or perhaps out of either reassurance or resignation – depending on which side of the house you sit – that the debate itself is altogether immaterial to whether or not the budget secures passage through the National Assembly.
Dr. Singh may be in high spirits now but we must wait and see whether the Economist Intelligence Unit Report’s ‘take’ on the 2011 budget may not induce yet another now commonplace ministerial tantrum.
