Same old song, different year

Sitting in Lahore to cover the federal budget is quite a task. Before the presentation of the budget, I discussed the budget covering strategy with my editor Ahsan Raza, who said that it would be a usual budget. He meant that we should not expect anything unusual, strange, shocking or off the beat. He was right when I listened to the budget speech. One thing which my newsroom always enjoys covering about the budget is ‘mixed reaction’. This mixed reaction news segment is what I have been seeing since my childhood. Often media covers along stereotypes.

And so it went — exactly as Ahsan predicted.

I have another who has a nose for a good story. When the budget speech began, he leaned over and whispered, “Seven percent. That’s it. Seven percent for the people who spend their lives pushing files in government offices.” He shook his head slowly. I knew what he meant. Because in a budget speech, the most awaited thing is is the salary increase.

Let me explain what happened in simple words.

The total size of the budget? A staggering Rs 18,771 billion. That is a number so big it is hard to picture. But numbers, as any good journalist knows, only mean something when they touch real lives.

So here is what this budget touches — and what it does not.

The government proposed a seven percent increase in salaries for government employees. Pensions for retired workers also go up by seven percent. Now, seven percent sounds like something. But when inflation has been eating away at people’s wallets for the past two years like a slow fire, seven percent is more of a patch than a fix. My colleague Zain put it perfectly when he said, “They gave us an umbrella in a flood.”

There was better news for salaried workers who pay income tax. The government proposed cutting tax rates across four income slabs. If you earn between Rs 2.2 million and Rs 3.2 million a year, your tax rate drops from 23 percent to 20 percent. Higher slabs also saw reductions. This is a genuine step in the right direction, and I will give credit where it is due — it will leave a little more money in the hands of the middle class.

Then came something that surprised many in my newsroom. The government announced a five percent withholding tax on income earned through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Content creators and social media influencers will now have their earnings taxed at the source by banks and financial institutions. The digital world, it seems, has finally caught the taxman’s eye.

But there was good news too for the tech sector. Freelancers and IT exporters — people Aurangzeb called “our asset” — received an extension of their 0.25 percent tax concession until June 2029. For Pakistan’s growing army of young coders and digital workers, this was a welcome breath of fresh air.

The defence budget, meanwhile, climbed to Rs 3,000 billion — a 17.6 percent jump. I noticed that our newsroom people wrote the number down without saying a word. Sometimes silence says more than any headline.

Back in the Assembly hall, the session itself was a spectacle. The opposition walked out before the speech even began. PPP members — the government’s own allies — were barely present. Rows of empty chairs stared back at the Finance Minister as he spoke of relief and recovery.

Ahsan was right all along. It was a usual budget.

The people of Pakistan deserved more than usual. They still do.