IF ever there was a budget exercise that was mere sound and fury, it was this one. Judging from the level of the furore that the opposition raised in the National Assembly during the budget speech, it was reasonable to expect that there would be plenty of substantive changes that would be demanded in the Finance Bill before its passage. Instead, all we got was a little tinkering at the margins, and the bill was passed more or less in the same form in which it was presented. After this, it is necessary to ask: what was all that screaming and shouting for? If there were such strident objections to the budget, why did we not hear more about them during the budget debate? The stark contrast between the noise and chaos of the budget speech with the near total silence when it came to the budget debate shows that our political parties are not interested in economic policy, only grandstanding and scoring political points.

More than any other finance act, this one went the furthest in incorporating the interests of big capital. The massive tax breaks, and the sharp increase in penalties for non-filers are its defining feature. The amnesty scheme is a one-off measure. It is the large changes in tax rates as well as the breaks offered to big business that will be the budget’s biggest inheritance for the next government. Hardly any substantive debate revolved around these matters though, other than small changes in some of the applicable rates in a few cases. Unfortunately, our political parties have lost contact with whatever philosophical moorings they had in the past, and the budget debate is an excellent example of this. Where parties in other, mature democracies bring different philosophical positions to the conduct of economic policy — adherence to free-market principles or state-sponsored entitlement programmes for example — in Pakistan, there is very little that separates one party from the next on economic matters. Most of our economic policy consists of gimmicks, such as new taxes on existing taxpayers but with new names, or rushing to meet quarterly performance targets set by the IMF. The present budget, in the words of the finance minister, seeks to change the landscape of economic activity, which is a breathtaking ambition to have in the last few days of one’s rule. What a pity that there was hardly any debate on its proposals.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2018