No Capital Gains Tax on stock market trading. Result; index up by 500 points. No Capital Gains Tax on property transactions. Result; urban properties shot up in one week. No Asset Tax on high value properties (read 2 kanals and above houses in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujrat, Gujranwala, Sialkot, etc).
No taxation measures announced on the rich and the affluent, whose data has been collected by the FBR, based on their wealth and lifestyle and their current tax payments discovered through their utility bills; electricity, gas, mobile phone bills); rents; size of houses; cars they drive; their foreign travels; the school fees paid for their children in local and overseas schools and universities).
No direction to provinces to bring agriculture income in the tax net; so who do they tax; the poor with the GST and the captive salaried class. Hybrid cars duty decreased. Are you kidding me? And the next big crisis, much bigger than the power just round the corner, is going to be Pakistan's water crisis.
The only solution is the Kalabagh dam both for energy and WATER. Here is how; The dam can be built in 5 years and will generate 3800 MW of free power; and there's more. Kalabagh dam can store 7 million acre feet water and irrigate 10 million acres of land in KPK, Sindh and Balochistan. One million acre-foot of water is valued at 1 billion US dollar per year. This means 10 billion US dollar of lost opportunity per year.
The dam will have a life of 50 years which means a potential loss of 500 billion US dollar and loss of 190,000MW, yes, 190,000MW of free energy over the life of the dam. All the arguments against it are so juvenile that one is dumbfounded at the politics of the issues. Sooner or later Afghanistan will build a dam upstream and the Indus will become a trickle and the entire region from KPK to the mouth of the Arabian Sea will be an utterly desolate wasteland.
What a Tragedy!! A nation in the hands of a small, selfish, privileged, exploitative coterie, completely deaf, dumb, blind, totally oblivious to the welfare of Pakistan and its people and the havoc they will wreak on this hapless country.
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