Come year end and we all dread the deadly2 words which take a sizeable bite out of your wallet I’m talking about I.T ... no not InfoTechnology but Income Tax .
I know we are all good citizens and try to pay our legitimate taxes except those we can evade ( sorry Plan ) them .
But then there are some which we seem tohave no issues whatsoever with paying and se dont even blink or think whilepaying them , amongst them are monies collected by govts forreasons which have long ceased to be relevant
These are some examples
1.Surcharge on Bus Tickets :
Have you ever looked at your bus tickets that you buy . The 5 ps surcharge on bus tickets in Mumbai and other places . Small as it is ( but believe me it adds up ) the point is that this was originally
levied towards supporting the Bangladesh refugees . how much of this money was ever used for that purpose and why is it still levied 35 Years hence is anybodies guess .
2. Neverending Road Tolls :
- On the expressway and other toll roads and bridges like Vashi bridge . The expressway was built on a BOT scheme i.e Build , Operate and transfer ..oh but it costs more to maintain then to build This
would be evident from the fact that the toll today is far more then that charged by the builders and at least they had a valid reason .. to recover thier costs .
- Coming tothe Vashi bridge ..why are we still paying and ever increasing toll when thecost of the bridge has probably been recovered many times over so far .
Toll for a limited time makes sense but really extending it indefinitely doesn’t except to perpetuate an easy though unjustified revenue stream and ensure employment for few more people .
Excuse mystupidity but I wonder what we pay road taxes for ...surely not for good roads.
3. Lotteries :
State lotteries are yet another form of taxation which we pay willingly . I suppose they must be paying out money to some winners but we don’t usually hear of the big winners . I wonder is this to avoid taxation issues , which coming to think of it , any which way you cant bcos deducted at source or is the whole thing rigged to present a semblance of working normally .Surely a poor man winning
a few lakhs / crores is a newsworthy item .
4.Excess Charges over MRP :
Another tax we pay as consumers are amounts over the MRP that we are often charged and pay willingly .
Now we havea perfectly good system of marking MRP’s on all items , yet we easily accept topay more at times without questioning the shop keeper .Only difference is thatthis tax goes into the merchants pocket directly not to the government .
5. VAT and Sales Tax differentials :
Now ideallythese are taxes which merchants are supposed to pay out of the profits theymake but it doesn’t work that way bcos you pay it to them on a higher figurei.e the sale price not the purchase price on which they actually pay at least
VAT . Again this is a tax paid to the merchant and not to the government .
So we can now console ourselves that that while we ‘plan’ our Income taxes in some areas we
do willingly make up by paying other taxes willingly .
Withapologies to all honest tax payers … tho to my mind they should worry about the extra taxes they pay as explained above .
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