EDITOR – It may be appropriate to open this topic with a quote from Benjamin Franklin: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes” and we get our annual dose of this certainty without fail in February.
Just about the time when we believed as individuals that we can make ends meet, Minister Gordhan has moved the ends. Everyone, whether it’s the housewife or the businessman, has a budget, a mechanism we all use as a control of expenditure. As such they can be seen as traps. The sad reality of this and past budgets is that it has stretched the overburdened five million registered taxpayers to the limit and that is a real tragedy.
We all understand that this may have been Gordhan’s farewell budget speech and it’s rumored that his successor will be none other than the controversial ex-CEO of Eskom, Brian Molefe, who was fingered in the Public Protectors “State of the Capture” report. So South Africans need to brace themselves for a differently inspired 2018 Budget Speech.
Balanced budget requirements are seen more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets. When a State spends more than its income and when the ratios of its international debt exceeds the threshold in relation to its GDP (48.1 per cent), then this budget must be seen as merely “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” just before it went down.
What more could Gordhan have done with the fixed income derived from the various taxes, levies and duties that comes from the National Revenue Fund, projected at R1,414 trillion, up by nine per cent from 2015/16. The state has increased borrowing in recent years. Net debt has gone up from R673 billion in 2009/10 to R1.8 trillion in 2015/16 and now to R2.2 trillion and projected to rise to R2 670 trillion by 2019/20.
To the average man in the street, all these numbers do not gel with the opening gambit of the Minister which I quote: “towards hope, confidence and a better future for all”. What we can take from this is that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.
Sicario
Durban
