Not one Pakistani says he will not pay his taxes. In fact 90% of us including me are happy to pay our dues. However what every Pakistani asks after paying the taxes is, "what do I get in return?". We don't get electricity, security, conservancy services, justice, water, sewage Govt. Services (I live in Isloo - villages are 1000 times worse off), the list is endless. Name one service available to Pakistanis that is at par with other developed Eastern countries (Not even comparing Pakistan to the worst western country).
It is like this, when you go to a shop to buy parts for your car, you pay money and in return you get the required part of the required quality. Right? You don't go to the shop, pay the money and walk out empty handed, or pay three times the amount for that part. I am pretty sure if you were not given your part or were charged three times the price, you would exchange hot words with the shop keeper. Tax is just like that.
Pakistan takes loans at questionable rates from US, IMF, WB etc which we never asked them to take and then to pay those loans off, the govt squeezes us more and more, I don't see the budget of the Presidency, PM house being curtailed. After all both men (indirectly voted in by us) live in residences that serve just one man per house!! Budgets of both houses put together can run a small country! The PM of the UK lives in a small house (10 Downing Street) and gets to office on the train, sometimes standing all the way if there are no seats to sit on. For our PM and Pres, there is one man each to hold his brief case, another to hold his cell phones, one to open the door, one to close it, if there 5 dors on the way then 5 men to open/close them. Another man to pull back his chair when his is about to sit. One to make tea another to serve it. The PM has declared his personal residence in Lhr an official PM's residence so all the protocol that is normal in the PM house in Isloo is now extended to the Raiwind house in addition to the Isloo PM house!!
We get taxed at every step of the way. Charging credit in the phone, withdrawing your own money from the bank, husband depositing a check in his wife's account (that happened to me). The latest increase in registration of new vehicles and transfer of used cars. Really!! I am not saying things should be free. Just that they be within reason.
Latest is the agricultural income tax. They are charging incredible taxes on lands that the govt has stopped providing water to!! So i go to the same question; what do I get in return for paying my taxes?? :S. If the farmer pays the agricultural income tax and in return he gets abundant water, I can write it on stone he will happily twice the tax.
As the saying goes, "savings begins at home". If I saw the govt curtail its own expenses – reduce the HUGE size if its mass, the money spent on protocol, the all expense paid foreign trips, staying at the most expensive hotels, and so on. Instead if my tax rupees went into building more dams that provided water for agriculture and electricity for industry, paying taxes would not hurt so much.
