"You are simply being personal and you must stop it."
"Cross my heart and hope to die I am not being personal."
"Oh yes you are, an international magazine and rating agencies have appreciated Dar's efforts to turn the economy around and you insist that the guy is doing a bad job and that he is an accountant and not an economist!"
"Well, let me first defend myself against your last statement namely that I accuse Dar of being an accountant and not an economist even after the finance portfolio has been given to him twice by his party leader Nawaz Sharif. He has made the tax return forms so complicated that we, as in existing tax payers, have to hire accountants to file the returns".
"So he has done his former profession a service. But this is his way of supporting provinces, I mean given that services is a provincial tax..."
"Don't be facetious. Anyway he hasn't increased the number of existing taxpayers significantly yet, only sent them notices as per the agreement with the Fund, and has retained the right to issue tax exemption to anyone he deems appropriate."
"But he has taken that power away from the Federal Board of Revenue and that's good."
"You know the Fund staff is rather naive if they agreed to this - I mean before taking the power away from FBR Dar sahib would direct the Board to issue exemptions to who ever he wanted, and now instead of directing the FBR he will do so himself."
"That's clever!"
"That's semantics. But anyway the difference in opinion between foreign journals and our local economists and journalists is that the former cite statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Statistics as their proof while we know that data is being manipulated and not even very cleverly. In addition our growth rate is the lowest in the region, though skeptics reckon the rate would be lower than what is being forecast."
"But the rating agencies have upped Pakistan's rating."
"Based on our foreign exchange reserves that are due to borrowing from abroad as well as domestically.....Budget support rose from 4.5 trillion rupees in the revised estimates of 2011-12 to 249 trillion rupees last year while markup on domestic debt rose from 843.8 trillion rupees in 2011-12 to 1108 trillion rupees last year."
"But the last year of the PPP government was 2012-13 not 2011-12 and this year things are going to get better."
"True, but Dar sahib came to power in the first week of June 2013 and upped borrowing. Besides our budget document becomes totally irrelevant a day into the new fiscal year so I will desist from commenting on this year's performance till the end of the year".
"Liar, liar pants on fire."
"Who? Me?"
"Are your pants on fire?"
"No, and neither are Dar sahib's yet but I am not sure of the reason why yet. Maybe it's the fire proof material used by the federal cabinet for their pants."
"Don't be facetious."