Hn_Ani2_Gj_Ahmd_Congress_Leader_Ranga_Rajan_Mohan_Kumar_Pc_02-43-47

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Transcript

00:00liberalization growth. What is going on? Six months ago itself, there were signs of this.

00:08If you remember Colgate, Nestle, whether we buy toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo,

00:16everyone's sales started to decrease. All companies were complaining that demand has

00:20slowed down. The common man does not have enough money. In fact, the CEO of Nestle said

00:28something very controversial. He said middle class is dying, middle class is shrinking.

00:35Six months ago, we saw the signs, but today that has come in the numbers that the GDP

00:41has slowed down to 5.4 percent. If you look at what's happening in our economy over the

00:47last one year, lending has been out of control. What type of lending? Not asset lending. Credit

00:54to persons via credit cards, via fintech lending, and all of it has gone to personal

01:00consumption. Recently, RBI cracked down on these ways of lending, and what has happened

01:06as a result is now household debt, which we take at home, loan, which is an unsecured

01:12loan, has started to default. So, the loan that we were taking for our personal consumption,

01:19that has now started to creep into the NPAs of banks. And this is just the beginning.

01:26You know, after COVID, there was pent up demand. Everybody wanted to go out. They were more

01:32buying bigger houses. There was luxury items being purchased.

01:49There has been no increase in salaries also. It is almost the same as it was 10 years ago.

02:03So, imagine you are going into debt, your loan is increasing, you are not able to pay

02:08your EMI, and at the same time you are not getting a job, there are no jobs in the market.

02:13And on the other hand, your salary is not increasing even in your job. It is not increasing

02:19according to inflation. And as far as the government is concerned, as far as the central

02:26government goes, for the first time in our history, the personal income tax payers,

02:33how much income tax revenue is received from them, it is more than the corporation in the central government.

02:39So, the amount of money we collected from companies became less than what we collected

02:46from individuals for the first time 4 years ago. And since then, it has only gone up.

02:52In fact, in this year, up till now, corporate taxes are up 1.2% year on year in terms of how much money we have collected.

03:02Only 1.2% corporate taxes have grown. That is the income tax that companies pay us.

03:07Whereas, GST is up 12% year on year collection, and income tax, that is personal income tax,

03:16that you and me pay, income tax payees pay, is up by 20%. So, who is funding the government today is the individual taxpayer,

03:26not companies. 5 years ago, when the tax rate of the companies was reduced, from then till now,

03:34tens of lakhs of crores have been lost by this government in tax revenues. And it has reached a point now,

03:41where it is the middle class taxpayer of this country, who is actually funding this country's government's tax revenues.

03:48It is actually happening because companies are not paying as much tax as they used to.

03:53So, in this context, we have a regime that has created one of the worst GST systems in the whole world.

04:05There are about 50 countries in the world where they have some equivalent of this sort of GST, which is GST or BAT.

04:12But nobody has the number of different complications that have been put in this GST system in our country.

04:19Few months ago, you saw, or actually rather, just I think this, earlier this month, or last month,

04:25where you saw the finance minister try to complicate GST even more by putting 3 different taxes on 3 different forms of popcorn.

04:32Now, on even different textiles. See, because in our country the middle class is shrinking,

04:39the ultra-rich and the upper middle class is actually leading in consumption.

04:45They are only buying the products. Actually, more and more consumption is shifting to them.

04:50So, what the government thinks they can do, is they can put everything into the luxury bucket.

04:55Above 2000 bucks, above 5000 bucks, you buy a pen, it's luxury.