Thursday, March 01, 2007

Open blog to the PM

Mr Prime Minister, I would ask you to take away all my tax rebates and exemptions. Tax me on my gross earnings. Don't give me any relief for the money reimbursed for my phone bill or for LTA or medical bills or even for the interest I have to pay on my housing loan. But tax me at a flat 10% rate. Don't have slabs of 20% and 30%.

I guess you will agree that you should not tax anyone earning up to Rs 20,000 a month. So, if you just have the tax meter ticking on gross yearly earnings of over Rs 2,40,000, and remove all tax reliefs, exemptions and rebate, Mr PM, people like I will be paying you less tax but I can assure you that your income-tax collection will go up several fold. Your exemptions are only encouraging the majority to be dishonest. Since I am not one, I have been losing out. But if you remove the exemptions and cut the tax slabs, the evaders will be forced to be honest, the honest will pay less tax and your tax collection will go up. What more, no one will have a reason to complain of a high tax rate.

And stop fooling people by adding all kinds of taxes to whatever we do. Don't make us pay a service tax and an education cess on every condom we buy. You are giving spouses an unnecessary idea! I know this was an idea first introduced by smart Alec Yashwant Sinha, in the form of a Kargil surcharge, after his government was caught napping in the hills bordering Pakistan.

Also, why not have a flat 15% tax slab for all corporate earning a gross revenue of Rs 1 crore a year? Why listen to the insipid babus who come up with dumb ideas like Minimum Alternate Tax? If you are imposing a minimum tax despite companies showing losses, it is very clear that you know those accounts are fudged. But your babus know not how to go about it. And finally, you have done away with MAT! Why not tax them on gross revenue? Mr PM, do you honestly believe that all those people who are showing losses or showing no profits are running charity shows? If a business is not successful, why will anybody continue to run it? The companies floated by the guy called the 'great Indian visionary' by India's pink papers, don't pay any tax and you are letting it be so?

We have a tax regime where Chartered Accountants make money for helping out corporates and individuals evade tax. You have thousands of fat-cat babus warming their chairs because they have weaved a complex tax regime for their livelihood. If you are honest about simplifying things, as you recently remarked, you just have to follow these simple principles.

2 Comments:

Blogger Hill Goat said...

this is way too late, both this post and my comment. give out such ideas one month before the B-day so that some passing viewer can do a narayanan on it and bring it out in public domain.

1:35 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

do u know how boring it is to see the same post day after day for weeks/months. u seemed more keen on the official literary adventure than this.
:P

12:53 pm  

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