Thursday, September 30, 2010

Clinton: Pakistan should tax its elite

From Hillary Clinton:

"This is one of my pet peeves: Countries that will not tax their elites but expect us to come in and help them serve their people are just not going to get the kind of help from us that they have been getting . . . Pakistan cannot have a tax rate of 9 percent of GDP when land owners and all of the other elites do not pay anything or pay so little it's laughable, and then when there's a problem everybody expects the United States and others to come in and help," Clinton said to a round of applause."

Well said! (Nice to hear that there was applause too.) And she might as well have been talking about any number of countries. And it isn't just Clinton saying it. We have US Envoy Richard Holbrooke, saying much the same thing:

"Their maximum tax rates are much lower than ours, and there's a lot of tax evasion there, as has been well reported. And we can't ask American taxpayers to pay the burden if the Pakistanis don't raise their own revenue," Holbrooke said. "So I don't want to leave people with the impression we're going to pay for the reconstruction phase."

These words could have been written by TJN. And who could disagree?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Lasse said...

There exist no universal conceptualization for tax as local religious concepts vary considerably. Muslims do not like taxes.

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=fi&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http://trustbus.weebly.com/1/post/2010/10/veroparatiisien-toiminta-turvattava.html

1:01 pm  

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