Mr Michael Sata answered the question at Oxford University yesterday:
So low taxes for everyone then? One is tempted to think PF will increase mining taxes but with the current government entering new Development Agreements (DA) every minute (do you really think Trident is not underpinned by a DA?) any future government's hands are tied. We'll come back to this as part of Manifesto Analysis.I have often been challenged on how PF will enable citizens to have more money in their pockets while lowering taxes. My simple answer to that is that we shall achieve substantial revenue increase by stamping out corruption, misuse of funds, streamlined government operations costing-saving schemes, reducing cost of doing business...I believe that the foregoing measures shall lead to higher employment levels, achieve savings for government and business, and improve performance and efficiency. Our economic policies shall be based on smart partnerships to achieve mutual benefiting position for investors and the government providing appropriate resource....There can be no justification why Zambia should have one of the highest taxation levels while at the same time industries that are making the most profits, such as the mining industry should hardly pay taxes, yet they exploit a non-renewable national resource...
sata made a very shallow attempt at answering this question(how his PF gov spends so much and yet still manages to lower taxes) his answer amounted to just cheap talk. let him tell us how much he intends to spend and how much tax loss his gov will afford. then am sure we'll see that he is talking about nothing, but a simple echo of the current gov programes.. my assumption is that PF gov will carry on with MMD programmes and change none of them. maybe they will change the corruption state of the country.
ReplyDeletei am happy, however, that he raised the issue of gov using state facilities to crash opposition. but he fails to outline his plans to prevent this from happening in the future