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Anu Muhammad: Who’s prospering on whose labor?

21 June 2013

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“Cutting hills, building brick kilns or shrimp hatcheries by destroying agricultural land, and high rises by filling in water bodies, setting up business by filling up rivers, making furniture at the cost of forests and hills as well as the commodification of education and medical services, and the price hike of electricity and gas can all point to an increase in the growth of the GDP.†– Anu Muhammad

Who’s prospering on whose labor?
by Anu Muhammad, translated for AlalODulal.org by Nusrat Chowdhury

The growing size and allocation of a national budget is nothing out of the ordinary. The GDP is growing and so is the size of the economy. That the budget would also increase in size is expected. The income of a budget consists of the money owned by the people. Deficits are balanced by the help of local and foreign loans. Money from the people is generally taken in the form of tax and duty.
The main component of the budget is the earning and spending of revenue. One could think of the revenue paid to the government as people’s money given in the form of tax, duty, and other fees. What about the expenditure of this revenue? The answer is administration, that is, the expenses that support the establishment. It is the money of the people that pays for every governmental and semi-governmental car, building, air conditioner, meeting, transportation, food, luxury, waste, lifestyle, foreign travels, shopping, and so forth. Maybe people do not notice, but the bulldozer demolishing their homes, the RAB or police baton hitting their heads, the muscle-flexing of the ministers, MPs, and bureaucrats, and the pageantry, the new buildings, and the expensive cars are all made possible because of their money. The government leaves everyone indebted with its promises and resources, but the source of that money is neither governmental nor private. It is people’s money.
The government rarely fails to extract taxes, duties, VATs, etc. from the people. Ordinary people never decline to give whatever the government asks of them.  And yet, the gesture is rarely returned. The taxes that the people of Bangladesh pay to the government have doubled in the last four years. … And yet, the burden on the people has not been lessened. Due to misguided policies, harmful contracts, and corruption there has been an increase in annual subsidies into this area. To lessen the pressure of added subsidies, it is the people who have ended up paying for the increased price of oil, gas, and electricity throughout 2012. As always these remain outside the declaration of the budget. Besides the extra taxes and duties, the hike in electricity and gas prices has increased the cost of living. The production and transportation costs in the productive sectors, including agriculture and industry have also increased.
Those who own the majority of the wealth and income of the country are still outside the network of taxation. According to both governmental surveys and the words of the Finance Minister, a large amount of the government’s money is unaccounted for. In terms of number, this would be about Tk. 500,000-700,000 crores. In economics or regular parlance, one would call this “black money.†A small part of this may be valid income, but because no tax has been paid on this for various reasons, it has now been listed as “undisclosed†income. One can be certain that the right epithet for this is “illicit†wealth, earned by theft, looting, corruption, fraud, aggression, and terror. This includes bribery, investment fraud, commissions, the expropriation of governmental or public property, extortion, the sharing of funds allocated for unfinished development projects, over- and under-voicing, and so forth. It is obvious that only the powerful can do this and that too with the support and encouragement of the administration. This is precisely why we keep hearing about the whitening of “black money†during the tenure of each government, but rarely see any effort to stop its source. It is because the administration and the owners of black money are the one and the same.
Although not included in the calculation of national income, a large part of it is earned in measures that only reproduce violence, aggression, and terror. This amount of wealth is on the rise and remains beyond taxation. It is the result of the development paradigm of the last decades that has been supported by each government in power. When the Finance Minister proudly declares, “The pace of this development will continue,†we get scared. We sense that black money will only increase through the application of next year’s budget as well as the costs of various projects and “non-projects.â€
[. . .].

Anu Muhammad is professor at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, where he has taught economics since 1982 and taught anthropology from 1991 to 2005. Translator Nusrat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College, USA.

SEE FULL TEXT AT: http://alalodulal.org/2013/06/20/anu-muhammad-budget/

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