Taxes support robbery.

Indians do not realise how we are being robbed in everything we do in the form of taxes. It is only when we look at the breakdown of what we pay that the colossal taxes we pay becomes apparent. To service a car, a simple exercise, there is a 12.5% VAT on oil filter, a 15% VAT on engine oil, a 2.5% Additional tax on the VAT, a 12% Service Tax on labor charges and a 3% SHE cess on the Service Tax. The SHE cess has nothing to do with improving the well-being of women but is a tax for Secondary and Higher Education. The total tax works out at 14.4%. Why are we paying a tax for higher education when college fees have been doubling and trebling in the last few years? This is probably to pay for the enormous rises in salaries of government school teachers, who are of poor quality and often do not turn up for work, to win the last elections. Although over 80% of children are attending schools only about 50% of children of class 5 can read texts of class 2. About 65% of parents prefer to send their children to private schools even if they find it hard to pay the fees and the school is not registered. The other obvious reason is that the government desperately needs to make up shortfall due to vast amounts of theft. Despite 2 years of effort the CBI has not been able to find any evidence to nail anyone in the Commonwealth Games robbery. The CWG was held in Delhi and both the Delhi and Central governments are Congress. To date not a single case has been proven against Congress fellows except, probably Sukhram, who was accidentally caught with notes stuffed in pillows and mattresses. Even so the case dragged on for more than 15 years to give him a chance to die of old age which he refused to do. He has been sentenced to 3 years in prison but whether he is actually in prison or has been given parole to attend weddings of relatives or to go to nightclubs we do not know. In the absence of accurate figures rumors tend to thrive and the rumor is that some Rs 200 billion was siphoned off in the CWG. The Shunglu Committee report has been quietly buried. Now the Comptroller and Accountant General is to present a report to Parliament which will show a loss of Rs 1.8 trillion in awarding coal mining rights to friends and relatives. Not only has the exchequer lost money but most of the mines were never dug and the power industry is having to buy expensive coal from abroad making us pay a lot more for electricity and suffer long hours of outage. Americans are lucky in that they have the Republicans demanding less taxes for everyone but in India there is a conspiracy of silence by all politicians because every party uses taxpayer money to bribe the electorate to win elections. The US economy is still growing, albeit slowly, whereas Europe, which is enforcing austerity, is contracting. Wish we had a Paul Ryan in India. Instead of the crooks that we are burdened with.