Partly Facetious : Inflation declines!

"Things are looking up I say, inflation is down by a little over 1 percent!"

"OK my friend, but it's still around 12.4 percent, now in my book that is bad."

"But are you sure it has gone down, we have a history of tweaking inflation figures as and when the Boss, with a capital B, gets upset at rising prices and recently The Khan did reportedly get very upset..."

"Hey, we only did that once during the Zardari days and simply reduced the food weightage by around 6 percent and viola down came the rate of inflation in double digits..."

"Did any of his successors raise the food weightage to what it was before?"

"Nope, Ishaq Dar didn't."

"So Dar shares the guilt?"

"Dar is an accountant and accountants juggle figures not by tweaking weightage but by simply adjusting the end figure."

"So no synchronization during the Dar years?"

"Right, so while only economists picked up on what we did to reduce inflation everyone knew how Dar reduced the rate of inflation."

"Why don't they implement policies designed to reduce inflation?"

"There are two problems with that, first imported technocrats have literally no power to change current expenditure allocations of a sitting government - from pensions to defence to repayment of past loans, nada no flexibility - while development expenditure gets slashed at the end of the year when the deficit is approaching an unsustainable level; then there is revenue collections and here too tax increases are limited especially during low growth years like the current year however non tax revenue can be raised particularly through privatization reflected by our long term support for selling off the family silver as soon as possible that incidentally led to litigation and strikes and......"

"My question is if these technocrats have no flexibility then why in the world does Pakistani government after government get them over to head an important ministry with all the protocols, the official residences, the pay..."

"I guess in the hope that they would change the laws of the land."

"What do you mean? They can't change any laws and yes they can recommend change to the Boss but parliament has to approve it and if a government does not have a majority in both the houses..."

"I meant impose taxes on those Pakistani nationals who are not resident in the country but have Pakistani passports."

"And why would they do that? You must be out of your mind."

"They have studied in prominent US universities and the US taxes its citizens wherever they work, including in multilaterals."

"Ha, ha!"