Unthinking
Unthinking
Posted 11:19pm (Mla time) Jan 24, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the January 25, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I THOUGHT I had seen rock bottom in this government's propensity to show dimwittedness, but it keeps adding new depths to it everyday. The latest, and by far the most horrendous, display of it is its plan to apply VAT on books. Or more specifically, to scrap the exemption currently enjoyed by books from VAT. You can't get more dimwitted than that.
Uniting to oppose the plan, the various organizations involved in book development and selling point out its faults. At the very least, they say, it is anti-education.
Government says having books covered by VAT will help it raise another P272 million, which should mean better support for education. Wrong, says the group. What the VAT on books will do is jack up the cost of education, which is costly enough as it is, by jacking up the prices of textbooks and books that fall under "required reading." It will drive many lower middle-class parents to pull their kids out of private schools and put them in public ones. That will limit access to quality education, currently being provided by private schools, to the elite or at best to middle-class families who are determined to make heroic sacrifices. In turn, it will add to the burdens of a public school system already groaning from lack of classrooms, textbooks and teachers.
Whatever revenue you generate from taxing books (and it's arguable if any of that will find its way to education) will be swept away like a village to the sea by a tsunami.
The plan moreover is plain anti-learning. The idea for exempting books from taxes comes from common sense in general and from the Florence Agreement of 1950 to which we are signatory. The agreement asserts the vital importance of the free flow of ideas, which is the sine qua non for learning, and calls for all possible support to be given to materials that promote learning. It even bids members to dismantle customs barriers (tax, currency, and trade) on imported books and audiovisual material. Such is the premium it puts on them.
As it is, the group says, the Philippines already lags behind other countries in the production of books. We only turn out 5,000 titles a year, compared to the US and Japan, which turn out 50,000 to 80,000 titles per year. A close neighbor, Malaysia, produces 14,000 titles a year. The reason for our meager output is not lack of talent or creativity-though the steep decline in educational standards over the last few decades is taking its toll there, too-it is the lack of an institutional framework to support book publishing. The high cost of paper, in great part because it is heavily taxed, shows so. India is the biggest exporter of books-and probably the most literate country-in Asia because book publishing has that kind of support.
And, finally, the group points out that the solution lies not in taxing everything in sight but in merely improving tax collection. The National Tax Research Center estimates that the loss to government from 1998 to 2002 from uncollected taxes and VAT was P127 billion a year. You just reclaim a fraction of that and you won't need to tax life's true treasures and pleasures, chief of them books.
I can only add to the tone of these arguments, by raising them a notch or two higher. At the very least, why should anyone in her right mind imagine that any tax to come from books will accrue to education? The dubious distinction of this country making it to the record books in corruption must show that taxes do not accrue to national priorities, they accrue to individual personalities. The national priority is not public education, it is private expropriation. The main beneficiary of taxes is not Juan de la Cruz, it is Jose Pidal. This is more than robbing the poor to give to the rich, this is robbing souls to give to the devil.
I recall that some years ago Asiaweek published the rankings of universities in Asia, and three Philippine universities, which used to be among the top 10 or 20 -- UP, Ateneo and La Salle -- had slipped to the 60s and 70s. Probably more now than then-this was many ago. One of the reasons for that was the low number of treatises and papers published by those universities in book form. That had greatly hurt the image of local universities, the reputation of scholars or academics being built on the question, "What books have you written?"
This country is illiterate enough as it is, as this newspaper should know, having campaigned vigorously, if often frustratingly, for spreading the habit of reading to Filipinos. Doubtless out of self-interest-no readers, no newspapers; but also out of a desire to get this country going-no books, no progress. Books remain humanity's greatest ally to enlightenment. With cable TV and video games dumbing the country's youth, you'd think government would give every incentive to books and reading. Such as build huge libraries everywhere or even giving books away. Not making books unreachable.
As it is, even government's plan to increase the "sin" taxes, or the taxes on cigarettes and liquor, is unconscionable. Why make the poor, who are the biggest consumers of cigarettes and liquor, pay more just because government can't collect from the rich? That is idiotic, and mean. Quite apart from that, the basic principle of taxation, as Benjamin Franklin et al, inscribed on tablet in their first act of defiance against British rule, is: No taxation without representation. The fact that the GMA government borrowed more than the two previous governments, to be paid for by the next generations of Filipinos, and has only widespread hunger and deprivation to show for it must show there is no representation whatsoever in this country.
Tax books? GMA should be happy no one has yet called for a tax boycott.
Posted 11:19pm (Mla time) Jan 24, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the January 25, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I THOUGHT I had seen rock bottom in this government's propensity to show dimwittedness, but it keeps adding new depths to it everyday. The latest, and by far the most horrendous, display of it is its plan to apply VAT on books. Or more specifically, to scrap the exemption currently enjoyed by books from VAT. You can't get more dimwitted than that.
Uniting to oppose the plan, the various organizations involved in book development and selling point out its faults. At the very least, they say, it is anti-education.
Government says having books covered by VAT will help it raise another P272 million, which should mean better support for education. Wrong, says the group. What the VAT on books will do is jack up the cost of education, which is costly enough as it is, by jacking up the prices of textbooks and books that fall under "required reading." It will drive many lower middle-class parents to pull their kids out of private schools and put them in public ones. That will limit access to quality education, currently being provided by private schools, to the elite or at best to middle-class families who are determined to make heroic sacrifices. In turn, it will add to the burdens of a public school system already groaning from lack of classrooms, textbooks and teachers.
Whatever revenue you generate from taxing books (and it's arguable if any of that will find its way to education) will be swept away like a village to the sea by a tsunami.
The plan moreover is plain anti-learning. The idea for exempting books from taxes comes from common sense in general and from the Florence Agreement of 1950 to which we are signatory. The agreement asserts the vital importance of the free flow of ideas, which is the sine qua non for learning, and calls for all possible support to be given to materials that promote learning. It even bids members to dismantle customs barriers (tax, currency, and trade) on imported books and audiovisual material. Such is the premium it puts on them.
As it is, the group says, the Philippines already lags behind other countries in the production of books. We only turn out 5,000 titles a year, compared to the US and Japan, which turn out 50,000 to 80,000 titles per year. A close neighbor, Malaysia, produces 14,000 titles a year. The reason for our meager output is not lack of talent or creativity-though the steep decline in educational standards over the last few decades is taking its toll there, too-it is the lack of an institutional framework to support book publishing. The high cost of paper, in great part because it is heavily taxed, shows so. India is the biggest exporter of books-and probably the most literate country-in Asia because book publishing has that kind of support.
And, finally, the group points out that the solution lies not in taxing everything in sight but in merely improving tax collection. The National Tax Research Center estimates that the loss to government from 1998 to 2002 from uncollected taxes and VAT was P127 billion a year. You just reclaim a fraction of that and you won't need to tax life's true treasures and pleasures, chief of them books.
I can only add to the tone of these arguments, by raising them a notch or two higher. At the very least, why should anyone in her right mind imagine that any tax to come from books will accrue to education? The dubious distinction of this country making it to the record books in corruption must show that taxes do not accrue to national priorities, they accrue to individual personalities. The national priority is not public education, it is private expropriation. The main beneficiary of taxes is not Juan de la Cruz, it is Jose Pidal. This is more than robbing the poor to give to the rich, this is robbing souls to give to the devil.
I recall that some years ago Asiaweek published the rankings of universities in Asia, and three Philippine universities, which used to be among the top 10 or 20 -- UP, Ateneo and La Salle -- had slipped to the 60s and 70s. Probably more now than then-this was many ago. One of the reasons for that was the low number of treatises and papers published by those universities in book form. That had greatly hurt the image of local universities, the reputation of scholars or academics being built on the question, "What books have you written?"
This country is illiterate enough as it is, as this newspaper should know, having campaigned vigorously, if often frustratingly, for spreading the habit of reading to Filipinos. Doubtless out of self-interest-no readers, no newspapers; but also out of a desire to get this country going-no books, no progress. Books remain humanity's greatest ally to enlightenment. With cable TV and video games dumbing the country's youth, you'd think government would give every incentive to books and reading. Such as build huge libraries everywhere or even giving books away. Not making books unreachable.
As it is, even government's plan to increase the "sin" taxes, or the taxes on cigarettes and liquor, is unconscionable. Why make the poor, who are the biggest consumers of cigarettes and liquor, pay more just because government can't collect from the rich? That is idiotic, and mean. Quite apart from that, the basic principle of taxation, as Benjamin Franklin et al, inscribed on tablet in their first act of defiance against British rule, is: No taxation without representation. The fact that the GMA government borrowed more than the two previous governments, to be paid for by the next generations of Filipinos, and has only widespread hunger and deprivation to show for it must show there is no representation whatsoever in this country.
Tax books? GMA should be happy no one has yet called for a tax boycott.
posted by Dante at 12:00 AM
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