EDITORIAL - Taxes and trouble

The government has the power and the authority to impose and collect taxes. But when taxation is `unfair, and it becomes too much for the unfairly taxed to bear, that government begins to court disaster. Many revolutions were born out of the unfair imposition of taxes. Many governments have fallen as a result of such revolutions.

This is neither meant to encourage nor suggest anything dire to happen to this country. But at the rate government has been taxing the people, and taxing them unfairly, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict a rosy outcome for people caught in very tight situations arising from very heavy tax burdens. It is perhaps time for government to take a long and hard look at its tax policies.

Right now, workers in government have started resorting to peaceful protests and work stoppages to protest taxes on even their bonuses and other incentives. These taxes are too much for those whose meager incomes are already slapped some of the highest tax rates in the world. These people are not shirking on their taxes. All they ask is equitability in tax impositions.

Ordinary workers, whether in government or the private sector, cannot escape from taxes because these are collected at source. As people who cannot escape and cheat on their taxes, they carry the brunt of the tax burden. They are not like the professionals and the big and rich businessmen who are notorious for getting around on their tax dues.

Worse, when there are proposals for a reduction in income taxes, the government's tax collection arm, the BIR, promptly tries to shoot them down. And it uses the worst and most insulting kind of rationalization in doing so. Just listening to BIR commissioner justify her objections to any tax cuts is enough to make people puke in disgust.

In objecting to any proposed tax cuts introduced in Congress, Henares said the timing is very bad because government is in the midst of heavy spending for its controversial conditional cash transfer program, a program that spends billions upon billions of cash doleouts to the poor. Such expenditures bring nothing back to the government, except perhaps to buy peace against any revolt by the hungry.

It is good to look after the welfare of people. But taxpayers need looking after too, especially if they are themselves among the poor. That nobody among the rich businessmen and professionals are complaining about high taxes needs no explanation. But when ordinary income earners complain, it is because their backs are being pressed against the wall.

Not only are they being paid among the lowest wages in the world, they are being made the milking cow of a government bent on a spending spree for the poor in a program that is not only unfair but something that it cannot afford. It is unfair for ordinary workers, both in government and in the private sector to be paid so low and to be taxed so high.