PML-N: the lion from Oz

Finally all that budget hype is over; the initial wave of views, reviews, criticisms and praises has past. Its now time to see how the PML-N fared in light of the promises it made, and of the hopes thought leaders had initially pinned with a party enjoying a solid strength in the parliament.
To begin with, three important inconsistencies between the budget speech and the budgeted measures ought to be highlighted.
In his initial pep talk, Ishaq Dar said this party will be tackling the inflation head-on. He said that prices will be watched, Bachat bazaars will be set and commodity shortages will be plugged even if the government had to import goods.
That said Dars taxation policies were quite the contrary. The PML-N government chose to increase GST by one percent to 17 percent in general and by six percent to 22 percent for those businesses that have an electricity connection but are not registered income tax filers.
If this was not inflationary enough, the government also increased advance tax and withholding tax. Both these taxes are essentially direct taxes that are adjustable at the time of filing income tax returns. But history suggests that these taxes become quasi form of indirect taxes, as businesses pass these on to the end consumer instead of adjusting them against their final income liabilities.
The second apparent inconsistency in Dars speech relates to government footprint in the economy. Dar rightly announced at the very outset that government has no business in doing business. But the budget documents do not reveal anything about the governments privatisation plans; nor did the remainder of Dars speech.
One would have thought that perhaps plans of privatisation, although not budgeted in this fiscal year, would at least be revealed to give some kind of direction to the economy. But it wasn - leading to the third inconsistency, given that Dar began his speech by saying that we are not here to only announce some of kind of annual accounting exercise; but much more.
That much more remained confined to some key medium term macroeconomic targets. But without any detailed roadmap to recovery, those medium term macro targets do not offer any direction to reach those milestones, let alone built trust on the achievability of those targets.
The absence of roadmap goes against the demand of thought leaders such as Dr Ishrat Hussain, former central bank boss, who argue that the crossroads that Pakistan stands at today, do not just demand a budget but a comprehensive and clearly spelled out road to recovery.
The last two items on the charge list revolve around the PML-Ns failure to take bold decisions.
What was needed from the PML-N was to announce a concrete strategy to increase documentation and expand the tax net. Instead, Dar relied on his darling measures which were much of the same old stop gap, presumptive tax regime-like quick fixes - basically nothing to push the taxman out of his comfort zone and force him to go out and get it.
Similarly, the partys so-called aggressive plans to resolve the energy crisis aren really aggressive at all. Aside from the stop gap measure of selling bonds to plug the circular debt, Dar was tight lipped - in fact quite sheepish - about the idea of increasing power tariff to zero in or at least reduce the gap between electricity production cost and sale price.
The only escaping argument that PML-N has is that it had too little time to prepare the budget. And given the circumstances, one may even allow that.
But if within the first hundred days, the PML-N fails to boldly wield the painful yet much-needed taxation and energy reforms while it still can, then one might as well call it a lion with a heart of a chicken. Then again, a spineless lion would still call itself a lion, wouldn it?