THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Arroyo government wants
a war of pillage and plunder on the world’s text messaging capital
through a proposed new tax on the popular and cheap communications
medium. We will exert all efforts—through lobbying, protests,
and texting—to stop the IMF from keep its damaging tentacles
from another sphere of our people’s lives.
What’s with the IMF? After wrecking our economy through nimcompoop
impositions long detested by various sectors, this global economic
monster would like to make text messaging its newest milking cow for
ensuring the payment of fraudulent loans and the funding of its economic
programs whose fantastic claims are now widely questioned worldwide.
If implemented, the IMF tax will be the third tax that will burden
the nation’s 14 million cellphone subscribers. Currently, the
pro-IMF government is already cashing in on us through the Expanded
Value Added Tax and Communications Tax. We have seen or felt nothing
in the form of government protection in exchange for the millions
of pesos in revenues from these taxes.
The IMF and the Arroyo government have obviously ran out of plausible,
pro-people ideas that will mitigate the ballooning deficit. They are
now opting for the brainless way out, which is to impose on the Filipino
people this undeniably regressive and anti-communications tax.
The IMF is also disinterested in improving people’s access
to telecommunications. Rather, it just wants more money, this time
they want to get it directly from consumers who buy cellcards or pay
monthly subscriptions.
If the IMF and the Arroyo government would really like to cut down
the deficit, the best way to do it is to save precious public funds,
combat corruption that eats away 20 percent of annual appropriations
of the entire government, and stop expensive trips abroad by top government
officials. If they want new taxes, the pro-people way is to find out
those profiting billions of pesos even in the middle of the economic
crunch.
Finance Sec. Jose Isidro Camacho is again lying through his teeth
by denying that the government is not going to entertain the IMF prescription
because the Philippines is not a sovereign country. Text messaging
is among the only remaining areas the IMF has not applied its damaging
impositions. The rest of the economy has been subjected to repeated
IMF impositions which the likes of Mrs. Arroyo and Mr. Arroyo have
graciously welcomed.
We welcome the encouraging pronouncements of some legislators who
have correctly detected the falsity of the IMF solution. We have more
of them will speak out soon on behalf of the over-taxed Filipino people
and in defense of text messaging, by far the most affordable telecommunications
medium available to the people.
---------------
Anthony Ian is the Spokesperson of TXTPower. He is also a Tinig.com
columnist.
