Budget Times

Budget times are taxing times. So Satiricus wasn’t visiting the back street dives today. Satiricus cannot be faulted for being a bit on edge. It’s not that he had to submit his taxes. It was having to cover the interminable debates in Parliament. But after listening to the opposition in the debate, he was wondering whether paying taxes was a good or bad thing.

Before this budget, Satiricus had thought that your views as to whether taxes were good or bad would depend upon which of the two segments of humanity you belong to – the economist or the taxpayer. Now the opposition had opened up a whole new world.

The second thing he believed before the lectures by the opposition is that if you have to pay taxes, it is your sacred duty to find out ways and means of avoiding paying them. In fact, a couple of years ago a very helpful American had written a whole book on how to avoid taxes. Satiricus has not read that book for two reasons. The first is that he is not an intellectual. The second is that he is not a philosopher.

The great economist John M Keynes had advised, “The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.” Satiricus, alas, is not gifted with such rewarding intelligence. Not that he needs it. For an income-tax presupposes an income, and if there is no income, how can there be a tax on it? Still, even if Satiricus had a taxable income despite being a journalist, filing a tax return would have been beyond his bird-brain.

Didn’t Albert Einstein warn, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax… This (preparing a tax return) is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher.” See? Satiricus is neither a Socrates nor a Plato. So even as a taxpayer, the most he could have done was to recite poet Ogden Nash’s piteous poem:

The more you earn, the less you keep

and now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to take

if the tax collector hasn’t got it before I wake.

What else could he have done when, as Benjamin Franklin frankly admitted, in this life “nothing is certain but death and taxes”? Wait, wait! Talking about life and death, there is just one ingenious, effective way to avoid taxes – play dead! That is what Douglas Adams sagely suggested with his tongue firmly in his cheek when he said, “I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.”

Satiricus would say, this is a sound suggestion – except for the minor problem that once you declare yourself dead, it is a little difficult to come back to life. Apart from all this, however, the basic question that taxes what passes for Satiricus’ brain is – why do the powers that be need a tax? The opposition had now cleared up everything for Satiricus.

The opposition had assured Satiricus that the government didn’t need taxes. One KFC fella had assured Satiricus that the government could just print money!

In fact, if they were to be believed, when they were finished with the budget no one would need to pay taxes ever. Satiricus, of course, would not be affected – but he was sure some of his buddies who did would be more generous with beers in the old back street dive.