LETS GET ANGRY ABOUT TAXES – A MENTAL REVOLUTION

Welcome to Guy Shorts, the world according to Sam. Winston Churchill once said that there is no such thing as a good tax. In Malaysia, there seem to be a belief that more government is always the solution. And with that, politicians throw about plans and prospects of increasing this and that taxes. When was the last time you heard a politician talk about reducing or slashing taxes? Never. So basically, it is give us your money and trust us. Really? We actually need a revolution in mindset on taxes. We must learn to be angry every time we are asked or when we pay

our taxes because a lot of it are not used well and some does not even go to good causes. Leakages are a plenty. Let's look at it. First, you work hard, earn your money legitimately and they take part of it away. So now yours and others money are put in a bucket to be decided and disbursed by someone you have never even met or trusted. Then, there are the nation's resources that are monetized. Whether effectively or efficiently, again is debatable and portion of it goes to that bucket. Then of course, the money's that are taken by a corporate tax. Then, had it been lower, companies could use

that money to invest for more business or pay you more salaries. They are workers, right? But it does not end there. Don't forget, they take from you some more. You go buy a car, the tax is exorbitant. You drive it, you need to pay tolls. You buy a house, you pay duty. You pay assessments. You then turn to just buy groceries, you're taxed again. In fact, everywhere you turn in spite of already paying an overall tax and on your hard-earned work you keep getting that leftover money taken by one tax or another again and again. And you practically have no say on how that is used ever again.

Have our politicians earned our trust? Ask yourself that question. Why then do you trust them with your money? The treasury of the government is the rakyat's money. So, everywhere you turn, they take your money. But that's not all. They also create debt you never ever took. That's another tax you don't even see. Remember 1MDB? That one takes the cake. They even have the audac- audacity to issue bonds with sovereign guarantee. There is us citizens guaranteeing through our government that we'll repay for the fraud of billions of dollars. We will still be paying this this debt

taken in our name for maybe the next three generations. Now, the MACC estimates that we have lost approximately 277 billion ringgit from the corruption over 5 years. This is the MACC say. That is the total economy of Johor and Penang combined. That's 55.4 billion ringgit a year. That is the tip of the iceberg we can see. Usually, the iceberg is 10 times larger than the tip that you see. Corruption of that size does not accumulate annually from 50 ringgit duit kopi or a few thousand under the table. It is people with great powers that can move large amounts, detected or

undetected, or maybe even ignored. Once in a while, where there is political infighting among those in power, you will you will also hear a politician's house or their cronies being raided and tons of luxuries seized and literal millions in cash found. Corruption, ladies and gentlemen, is literally another tax that are heaped upon us. That corruption leak of 55 billion per year, as identified by the AMCC, dwarfs subsidy numbers. Deal with that instead of punishing citizens, especially those paying taxes. All of these structural policy deficiencies in use in the use of our tax money

are amongst the main reason that after the separation, Singapore today has a per capita GDP of USD $99,000, and ours is still at an embarrassing $13,000 in just about 60 years from the same starting point. I want us to rethink how we look at taxes. The kind of structural problem we have and the solution proposed is always take and take, spend and spend our tax money without addressing root causes of eliminating the real policy problems in spending and getting rid of corruption. Go ahead. List all the structural problem yourself, both in tax and spending, then

you will realize why there must be a mental revolution in looking at taxes and the policies evolving itself. Bigger government invites bigger tax burden, more wasteful spending, more regulation that also translates to larger opportunity for corruption. That is just the nature of human greed. The more money can be taken from others by power, the more it will be taken and the more incentive is that it is there to actually spend unwisely at their whim and fancy. Lowering taxes will force governments to be more efficient and will lower corruption. We must demand as a

commitment from individual politicians and political parties to run on a manifesto of smaller governments and less taxes. And how they intend to achieve all these objectives. We really need a mental revolution. Taxes should not be something we merely accept as an inevitability. Start questioning every taxes. Start being angry every time someone talks about raising any form of taxes and inevitably the spending that follows. Ask taxes in all forms be lowered and where possible abolish. We have a country to save. Thank you.