The Budget speech – talking to the public – a media stunt – unreal!

In all honesty the Budget speeches are used by clever politicians purely as a media stunt to sound generous. In a Santa Claus kind of way the President was serving up a few goodies to a few people who then are shown clapping in thanks!! All planned and scripted to the core.

The real story is hidden in the numbers and the 3 volume document that is given to the MPs with details of money allocated to all the departments of ministries and when one has time to go through all of that, one realizes how unfair and unreasonable the whole thing is.

Much of the numbers and percentages and the promises made are incorrect and deliberately mislead. The true picture of the lack of revenue in total even to pay off the debt interest is not mentioned anywhere. The expenditure is skyrocketing and there is no way of paying from Annual income, and we have to resort to borrowing both to pay our interest as well as for normal recurrent expenditure. That is unwise as any house wife will tell you, she will soon be in so much debt to money lenders it will not be funny.

It is therefore in the interests of the country to tighten the belts and pay down the debt and refinance at lower interest rates. Making claims which are interpreted incorrectly by the pundits who try to analyze what is being said is also fraught with danger. This is because everything is not what it seems, and one has to read the fine print and come to one’s own conclusions.

One glaring deliberately misleading statement was the use of the term, the Country spends 4.1% of its National Income on Education, changed in the Daily News to the Govt will spend 4.1% of GDP on Education. So in the budget the President’s estimate of Rs306B on education is a figment of his imagination, whilst the true expenditure by the Government on Education is one third of this amount, a lower percentage of the GDP this year than last. So fiddling logic and figures to fool the reader, and especially the public is a favorite pastime of the Budget deliverer.

It is left to us to decipher, take what is said with a pinch of salt and hope that our quality of life will not further erode due to the provisions in the budget. It is getting increasingly difficult for people to manage on their current earnings, as costs keep escalating including the burdens put on by the budget. There is no plan in the budget to increase that earning figure at all!