Tell Ghanaians the reality; don’t rush to remove promised taxes – Government told

Economist Dr Priscilla Twumasi Baffour has urged the government to reconsider their campaign promise to remove taxes imposed by the previous government.

Prior to the 2024 elections, President John Dramani Mahama and the NDC promised to scrap taxes such as E-levy, betting and others.

But Dr Priscilla Twumasi Baffour believes that there is nothing wrong for the government to come out and tell Ghanaians the reality that removing the taxes will cause more harm to the economy.

“It’s a difficult period, and I believe that there is nothing wrong if the government, I mean, the finance minister, comes out to say that we promised X, Y, and Z, but this is the reality, it is not possible. I believe that it is early days and they still have the good will of Ghanaians so they can try it and do what is practical.”

“Because the risk to businesses and Ghanaians as a whole is that if the trajectory that the economy is currently on switches and we enter into another phase of turbulence, it will be quite disastrous for everybody. It affects people in terms of standards of living. Fixed-income earners really struggle with high inflation and all that,”

“And so I do not think that it should be something that is impossible. Of course, initially, it would come at a little  political cost, but I think that the government has a lot of room at the moment, and it should not be hasty in taking out all the taxes that it promised to do if indeed it’s very difficult to make up for it,”

“The whole idea of, for example, taking out a lot of taxes, nuisance taxes as we heard some time ago, is the fact that you want to de-emphasize taxation and look at production. And so when the revenue grows, tax revenue is the function of the growth of an economy but the reality is that in our context, growth is quite difficult. It takes quite some time to be able to observe a given substantial level of growth,”

Source: Elvisanokyenews.com