All about politics

The budget for the next financial year unveiled by finance minister Ishaq Dar on Friday will set up the country’s collapsing economy stuck in an impassable rut for another year of stagflation marked by depressed growth, high inflation, and greater and faster debt accumulation. Mr Dar’s budget and his fiscally irresponsible spending plans are all about politics — more precisely about upcoming elections — rather than dealing with multiple longstanding structural economic challenges. His budget speech was revealing not for what he said but for what he didn’t say. Missing from his long speech, which was focused more on the past than on the future, was the plan to get the stagnating economy through the next year and beyond it and fix its fundamental flaws. Not a word was spoken on the crucial issue of broadening the tax base by netting the large untaxed sectors like real estate, retail or agriculture to boost revenue or privatisation of loss-making state-owned businesses that are a big drag on the nation’s meagre resources that could have been spent on health and education.