My lord, it is not the farce of convening pre‑budget meetings whose minutes are politely filed and promptly ignored that riles me, nor the way an entourage per diem multiplies like rabbits on the return flight. What truly fascinates is the government’s inventiveness in solving Nyasaland’s perennial fiscal woes: if imagination were revenue, we would be debt‑free by now. From a fiscal‑policy vantage every pre‑budget forum reads like a single sentence in a very bad novel: Introduce a tax.
Then another. Then one more for good measure. The annual refrain is less a plan than a litany of tax, tax and tax scrawled in the margins of an economic textbook that has never met our economy.
Now, with the proposal to tax and tax pensions, the Minister of Finance, Yosefe Hearchild, appears to have taken career advice from Elon Musk who insists, with developing technology, retirement is an old-fashioned relic; hence, people should not spend sleepless nights over saving for retirement. If saving for old age is to be declared obsolete in two decades, why not accelerate the obsolescence by taxing the savings today? It is a tidy logic: make pensions pointless, then congratulate yourself for modernising the tax code.
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So all those years of toil and thrift; those rainy‑day jars and careful ledgers, were not for rainy days at all but for the State’s convenience. When the retiree finally navigates the labyrinth of paperwork to claim what is rightfully theirs, the State stands ready with a punitive levy, as if gratitude were a taxable commodity. And here is the most grotesque irony: most pension payouts are not hoarded in secret vaults but passed on to surviving kin when the pensioner is gone.
Taxing those payments is, in effect, taxing the dead. If the State insists on treating retirees as fiscal targets, then by the same logic it must accept that the beneficiaries, who could be children, grandchildren, the widow who depends on that cheque, are being punished for the very act of survival. My lord, we can be desperate to broaden the tax base without mocking both the dead and the elderly. Taxing the elderly and their survivors is not fiscal prudence; it is a policy that perpetuates poverty and corrodes the social compact.
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