Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
LALIT accuses the Ramgoolam Budget of capitulating to the cowardly and cruel arguments of what seem like half-witted economists and commentators. These “experts” say the main way to balance the budget is simply to gradually end old-age pensions for those between 60 and 65. So, as Finance Minister, Navin Ramgoolam has done just that. Whereas there are many ways to cut expenses and increase income. The main way to solve the economic problems of the Republic of Mauritius is, of course, in the medium and long-term, by increasing production and creating jobs for people who already live here. In the short term, taxes on the rich must be high enough to cover old-age pensions, the oldest of all Mauritian social services.
Anyway, the members of the PTR-MMM-ND-R&A Government are so astounded by the huge outcry against the Budget cancelling old-age pensions between 60 and 65 that they are organizing “discussions” for amendments even after the Budget has been presented. The new Government is preparing, and may have already intended this scenario to play out, for talks about amendments, so prepare for the fall-back position of imposing the hideous “targeting” of the poor and vulnerable. So, this article is opposing both the raising of the old-age pension age, and the targeting being proposed to fill the gap. 
Suddenly the outcry shows everyone that the country is divided into two clear social classes: the broad masses, who live from money earned from family members working and who are in disbelief that the new Changement Government is attacking their families’ monthly revenue this way, and the rich class, for whom payment of Rs15,000 is paltry thus easily cancelled.
The economists and commentators, who organized Ramgoolam’s capitulation, tend always to act in the interests of this tiny class of the rich. This is simply because they tend to work for the rich, directly for the private sector capitalists or indirectly via a bourgeois state that rules in favour of this tiny class. So, the economists make up arguments to fit the interests of the class that pays them.
These are their arguments
First they began in 2020 to frame the old-age pension as a “Basic Retirement Pension”.* This is a misnomer. The trade unionists must pick up on this. It is what it is: an old age pension. Everyone in the broad masses accurately calls it “pansyon vyeyes” and everyone knows what that means. Except economists, who clearly don’t know, or want to confuse us all. It is a pension you get even if you are not “retiring” basically from any “work” at all. You get it because of your age. Society recognizes that you, being 60, deserve a regular income. For the record, so that economists stop making fools of themselves, a large proportion of people, when they turn 60, are not “retiring” from any paid work at all: they are, and have often for a lifetime been, “housewives”, for example, or they are workers whose work sector law retires them at an age ranging from 45 (women labourers) up to 58 in other sectors, or people living with a disability, or simply the tens of thousands of unemployed. Are all these people not “people”, when they get their old-age pensions?
Second, after incorrectly framing the pension as a “basic retirement” pension (which they even abbreviate to BRP, when it really is an OAP), the economists then go on to say that “everyone” these days in any case “works well beyond the age of 60”. Let us now look at this “everyone” they mean. They mean “everyone in their own social class” and “everyone in the higher class, like the one that remunerates them”. So, out of their own social prejudice, they “know” that sugar cane labourers, other field labourers, rubbish collectors, bus and lorry drivers, road-builders, masons and their helpers, all work after they are 60.
Thirdly, the economists argue that many people can easily afford not to get the pension. So, they argue, the Government can save money by “targeting” the poor, and giving pensions only to them. To “target” someone means to aim a weapon at them in order to harm them. That is the base-line meaning of this military metaphor. Only the huge inequalities that have evolved over the past 50 years have allowed such a term to be used by not only economists, but others who should know better like academics, journalists and even do-gooder NGOs who “target” the poor, “target” the sex workers, “target” battered women, etc in the course of their “projets” funded by the rich for the poor. When economists and others do not feel the inherent violent aggression in “targeting” a human being, more cruelly still in “targeting” someone they know is vulnerable, it is a sure sign of being prone to making tumbrels.
Targeting the rich, by contrast, can pave the way for social justice. The government can just target them for income tax, company tax and wealth tax.
To when in the opening paragraph we accused economists of cowardice, it was because the powerful, rich people have their backs. We called them cruel because they propose aiming a weapon at each vulnerable person. Now, let us get to why we called them “half-witted”.
And now we quote from a LALIT article in Le Mauricien on 26 May 2022 before a Padayachy budget, “Economists with perfectly good qualifications and brains, when they find Government spending ‘too high’, look only at one side of the Form IV Accounts columns: ‘expenses’. They go on-and-on about introducing targeted food subsidies, pensions, targeted everything. Yet, ‘too high’ is a relative term, as any child knows. It means ‘too high for Government revenue’. So, economists have two choices to balance any item. How come they suddenly forget the ‘revenue’ column?
“What Government pays out for universal pensions, it can just take back in taxes in its revenue column. This way, social services stay ‘a right’. Why are economists willing to pass for half-wits by insisting on ‘targeting the poor’? The mechanism used, as economists well know, has a name: ‘claw-back’. The “claw-back” targets the powerful, and in addition, there are very few of them, so the task is easier and cheaper. It helps the “income” side of the accounts.
The State gives everyone, say, old-age pensions, then claws the money back from those who can pay. In Prime Minister Ramgoolam’s favour, he has introduced an income tax, which he announced in his Budget Speech as at 10% and then 20%. But this is so timid.
Economists, to get back to their being half-witted, know the disadvantages of targeting. It demands a massive bureaucracy. This, in turn, produces corruption, favouritism and extorsion. It is paternalistic, intrusive and costly. The very poor get neglected by it. A handful of tricksters beat the system and, when discovered, discredit all of social security. Economists know that the rate of income tax is easily scaled for social justice: the higher your revenue, the higher the rate of tax Government imposes. The lower, the lower. And the very low receive a payment instead i.e. negative income tax, and it already exists.
Meanwhile, the main tax revenue in Mauritius continues to be from Value Added Tax. This does nothing for social justice. On the contrary. It taxes the rich a smaller proportion of their revenue on items or services they buy, and the poor a larger proportion of theirs! And we accept this injustice?
Economists carry the blame for not exposing it. Instead they campaign for in favour of targeting the poor, against income tax on the rich. Why not propose higher income tax? It is not that they really are half-wits. Or sadists. They just do not mind seeming to be half-wits and sadists. Why? It’s because they intend targeting to benefit the capitalist class i.e. that small class with a monopoly on “investment”. A few economists may, themselves, be in the capitalist class – in real estate and off-shore – but most are just paid high salaries by the capitalists to ensure their complicity with the class interests of the rich.
‘Economists, to get back to their being half-witted, know the disadvantages of targeting. It demands a massive bureaucracy. This, in turn, produces corruption, favouritism and extorsion. It is paternalistic, intrusive and costly. The very poor get neglected by it. A handful of tricksters beat the system and, when discovered, discredit all of social security.’
