`Malaysia’s taxation policies must be guided by two fundamental principles, namely to tax when it is absolutely necessary and it should not be considered as a burden to taxpayers’.
The above statement was part of your opening remarks at the two-day National Tax Conference 2023 on 1 August 2023.
As a result of the borrowing spree by the previous administrations, you represented to all Malaysians that your administration now is balancing, paying off debts plus re-generating the economy.
Presently the country has a national debt of around RM1.3 billion of which around RM1.1 billion was inherited from previous administrations.
Since that day, moving forward it appears that you have been trying to convince the ordinary rakyat that they should hand over more of their hard-earned cash, saying that, if anything, they are under-taxed.
Since that day, you have also raised a host of taxes while also introducing new ones.
Your message unmistakenly was that if people want better public services and a reduction in the country’s debt burden then they have to pay up.
Ordinary conversations for the last few months are often dominated by the pain of taxation and the views of yours and those in your office has exasperated majority of the ordinary rakyat who already feel overburdened.
Many felt they are overtaxed, repressed, exploited and abused and to compound their exasperation, they felt that they don’t receive even 1% worth of value from their taxes.
You defended the raising of more taxes in order to boost government revenue and reduce borrowing.
If you are really sincere in your commitment, you should first ensure taxes are properly collected and utilised, as well as eliminate corruption - a problem which you repeatedly made it very clear and repeatedly publicly in addressing.
All these increase in taxes or new taxes may be self-defeating as they increase the cost of doing business, which leads to closures, job losses and subsequently a reduction in the amount raised from income tax.
You mentioned you have no choice but to implement these even though it is unpopular and probably will cause the government to lose support amongst the people but you are determined to continue for the sake of the country.
The ordinary rakyat are complaining but they know they can’t do anything about it.
Maybe this is the best time for Malaysians to take heed of the call by Rafizi Ramli who said in Sept 2023 for Malaysians to eat out less and make it a habit and learn to live within their means from now on.
FLK (leekhean.foo@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.