Our Finance Minister, Mr. Wagle spent late nights drinking either coffee or the energy drinks at the Finance Ministry to come up with the 2 trillion-plus national budget for the upcoming fiscal year. It seems that this government has grand visions but will have to borrow more from both domestic and bideshis to keep up with their plans!
This budget is mostly good news for the middle class when it comes to income taxes. You only have to pay the required 1% tax if you make less than a million Rupees a year. But at the same time, we will be paying extra for our kids' school fees at private schools and seeking some doctors' advice at private hospitals.
If you consume more than 50 units of batti then pay some extra VAT on it as well. And for the EV thing, you pay taxes according to the price of the vehicle rather than the kw this and kw that since most of our EV byaparis were paying less taxes by finding loopholes as usual.
Let's look at the Rs 2.1 trillion (US$ 13.8 billion) budget now. We will be spending almost 60% just to keep the government running, as 1.2 trillion is earmarked for recurrent expenditure. And on top of that, our sarkari karmacharis will get a 10% basic salary hike and another 10% for performance incentive allowances. Hope our men and women in white shirts will not be seeking a few thousand Rupees bribes just to get our paperwork approved in the coming days.
And now comes the capital expenditure part that is used for development purposes, be it our schools, hospitals and roads and what not. Only 20% of our national budget will be spent on any bikas and we hope most of it will not be spent during the monsoon season when the fiscal year is about to come to an end like in the past three decades.
We are already rolling in almost US$ 20 billion total debt and 20% of our budget will be used for financial management, meaning paying the interest and some principal on loans our government has taken from both domestic and foreign lenders.
According to our Finance Minister, the government hopes to collect at least Rs 1.4 trillion from taxes and other non-tax revenues while asking for Rs 61 billion in foreign grants but that still leaves us with a massive Rs 657 billion deficit. How do we plan to balance the books? We borrow more from our banks and bideshis!
Let us wish our government the best. Hope they will be able to collect more dough from all of us and especially the shady byaparis who have been faking VAT bills, under-invoicing and evading hundreds of billions of Rupees in taxes every year. If all landlords in the country even pay the rental income taxes honestly, then we should be able to add a few extra billions to the rastra ko dhukuti!
Let us hope that our farmers will get their fertilizers on time and our sugar cane and dairy farmers get the best price possible and get paid on time as well. Let us hope our smokers and drinkers will keep indulging in their respective vices and contribute to the tax revenue as well.
The only problem I have is that the 40% rebate thing on farmers who invest Rs 2 crore. How many real farmers have that much cash lying around? It will only help the same business houses that have received freebies in the past in the name of investing in agriculture. Maybe the government should also identify the real farmers and the fake byaparis who exploit the farmers!
The government also wants to give priority to the IT sector, and that is encouraging but we should also ask our outsourcing firms to pay out talents here more and not peanuts while they bag contracts for a dollar and pay their staff a few cents.
Overall, let us all be optimistic and wish the government well. Maybe our Finance Minister should visit all G20 countries and ask all of them to invest in Nepal instead of relying on loans every year to balance our books!
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