Are you feeling disgusted and enraged post-budget 2024? Because every salaried person in the country rightfully is. We have known for decades that there is a need to broaden the base of taxpayers in the country.

In the last few years, record numbers of people have been pushed back below the poverty line, and this has necessitated some of the severest belt-tightening on families that at least I can recall in my lifetime. More than any other time in our history, this was the time to break the mold in which past budgets were cast, be innovative, (finally) do what is right, reduce indirect taxes, and start collecting direct taxes from defaulters and untaxed sectors.

Instead, we got the most unimaginative budget, one that resorted to the usual: squeeze the same 1.4 per cent of the population that made the mistake of ever registering themselves as tax filers. Meanwhile, the other 98.6 per cent (minus children) may party on, not as tax evaders worthy of prosecution (how other countries label and treat people that do not give a due account of their income and pay their taxes), but as members of a unique category designated ‘non-filers’.

It has been a few weeks since details of Budget 2024 were released, and commentators have identified several outrages it contains: simpletons who believed government assurances that eventually the base of taxpayers would be broadened have been rewarded with a Scandinavian-level income tax rate of up to 45 per cent and will receive public services worse than in most Sub-Saharan African countries in return. There are taxes on stationery to punish anyone who dares to send their children to school and get an education and even higher taxes on packaged milk, lest anyone should get the bright idea to keep themself and their family safe from the........

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