Hands off our money.

The government extorts money from us by force in everything we buy or sell in the form of taxes. We spend years of hard labor studying for higher degrees, our parents suffer massive anxiety in trying to get us into good schools and colleges and spend a fortune on fees. When we start work we are at the lowest rung which means very hard work for meager wages. Without realising we start paying tax from the very first day at work, long before receiving our first paycheck. We pay tax on petrol as we travel to work, we pay tax on the lunch that we eat outside and we pay tax on the internet service that is essential for work today. There is great delight when the first paycheck arrives but even before it reaches us the government has sucked its share of blood in the form of TDS, or Tax Deduction at Source. There is a tax of Rs 16.44 on 45 tablets of R Cinex 600, which is used through the entire period of treating TB and TB is much commoner in the poor. Not content with such extortion the government is thinking of taking our money from us altogether. They want all transactions to be ' cashless ' or by electronic transfer. It proposes to do away with service charges but not service tax on cards. It will get rid of convenience charges, whatever that is, but what about yearly bank charges for issuing cards. It proposes tiny reductions in Value Added Taxes if cards are used. But why are politicians so keen on doing away with cash? It is not because the government loses money in printing notes, as they claim. They make money from cash through ' seigniorage '. The US makes $20 billion a year so India makes less, but they do not lose. They claim that if there is no cash there will be no counterfeit and drug smuggling will become impossible. Perhaps, but we will lose our privacy completely, which means that they will be totally in control of our lives, which is unacceptable. Just as high taxes on alcohol regularly cause deaths because the poor look for cheaper alternatives, as in Mumbai, it will be a disaster for the illiterate. All of us have filled out withdrawal forms at banks for illiterate people wishing to withdraw money, but they have control because they can count the cash they receive and they recognise notes by color and size. They will need help from others to use cards which means their passwords will become common knowledge. If money is transferred to a wrong account it is impossible to get it back. When you applied on forms for passports you paid Rs 200 to a fellow to fill it out, stand in a queue and deposit it for you. Now you need to pay Rs 1500 to a fellow to get an appointment at the passport office. We, old people, find computers incomprehensible anyway and ever since Mr Amitabh Bachchan called it computerji it has taken on divine qualities, vastly increasing costs. Be satisfied with extorting taxes, do not plunder all our wealth. Keep your hands off our cash.