Pinas Forum

The government should really tax the Catholic church. Selling god is one of the most profitable enterprises in the country. Moreover, they keep interfering with government. It should be taxed!!

Dont tinker with the E-VAT

It is the rich and the upper middle class that will benefit from suspending the E-VAT on oil because they are the biggest users of oil productsnot the poor. The poor use their money, because they cannot help it, mainly to buy rice and agricultural food products that are VAT-exempt.

 

Tinkering with the E-VATwhich can only be done by passing a lawwill plunge the Philippines back into the dream world it lived in before.

The purpose of the law was and continues to be to gather as much money for government to use in launching and completing major infrastructure and socio-economic modernization programs. These would make the Philippine economy rise from stagnation, compete more ably with other developing and emerging economies and thereby make the Filipinos a more prosperous people. The VAT, which in simple terms is an overarching sales tax, was to become a major vehicle to finance government plans and programsincluding poverty-reduction, health-enhancement, educational-system improvement and infrastructure-construction programs. The VAT would also substantially reduce deficit-spending and its destructive chain of consequences on the economy.

It can be said with certainty that the achievement of the Arroyo administration to raise the countrys GDP growth rate in 2007 to a record 27-year-high of 7.2 percent was, to a large extent, owed to the E-VAT.

The government, having enough moneythanks partly to the E-VAT collection and the overseas Filipino workers contribution to it, in the first months of 2008, could immediately blunt the effect of suddenly very costly rice and essential commodities. The administration handed out P500 each to some poor families and, through the National Food Authority, sold imported rice at subsidized prices.

Tinkering with the E-VAT  will threaten the completion of major infrastructure vital to industrial and tourism-related projects begun by foreign direct investors. Schoolhouses and hospitals that are being built to greatly elevate the level of basic education and health care in our most depressed areas will be left unfinished. Budgets for the support of scientists and their research work aimed to launch a dramatic rise in world-class technological achievement in Philippine universities will no longer be available. Poverty-reduction and livelihood-creation projects in slums will have to be dropped. More and sadder consequences would happen if the E-VAT is suspended.

And, as shown by our own and other countries experience, temporary measures once instituted tend to take root and become permanent.

This is an important topic. When I was planning to buy a property, I made sure that a professional advisor tells me about all income tax benefit on home loan. It is one thing that a person can consider because it will help a lot in future.