Rubbish talk should be taxed.

After the passage of the Food Security Bill the Sensex plunged by 590 point and the rupee fell by 1.88 to 66.19 to the dollar. In an attempt to apply balm on the looming disaster our most revered Finance Minster asked the country to be patient and said," We will contain fiscal deficit at 4.8% of GDP and the current account deficit at $70 billion this year." Livemint, 28 August. Er, but how? You are the man who started the NREGA scheme, forgave farmers' loans and increased civil service salaries by 80% to win the elections in 2009. There is no way to get that money back. This time round you have started the Backwards Areas Grant scheme at Rs 750 billion, a fake reward scheme for young people who have undergone vocational training for 1 month, supposedly to cost Rs 10 billion and a scheme to supply tablet computers again to young people, which is supposed to cost Rs 80 billion. These are your estimates so we can be sure that all these schemes will end up costing the nation 10 times as much. Now the mother of irresponsible spending, The Food Security Bill has been passed and is supposed to cost Rs 250 billion but only Rs 100 billion have been budgeted for it. Experts say that it is going to cost Rs 1.8 trillion, the same amount that was lost in the fraudulent allocation of coal mines. Where is the rest going to come from? So, you have come up with a 10 point plan which is - reduce the fiscal deficit by controlling expenditure, rein in CAD, add to the country's foreign exchange reserves, revive investment cycle, expedite the capital expenditure plans of state owned companies, capitalize state-owned banks, leverage the good monsoon, encourage manufacturing, boost exports and resolve land and environment issues. Pious words, indeed. You cannot control expenditure because you dare not go against your chief and manufacturing cannot improve when demand is depressed by uncontrolled inflation and there is no electricity. TOI, 28 August. Electricity is becoming unaffordable because we are not producing coal. Thermal coal import rose 52.5% to 12.2 million tonnes in June compared to 7.88 million tonnes last year. Import for this fiscal could be a record 165 million tonnes compared to 137.56 million tonnes last fiscal. Livemint 26 August. Sadly, there is no tax on rubbish talk.