Sin tax increase a boost for illegal traders

WHILE smokers and drinkers are counting their blessings that the increase in “sin” taxes was lower than expected, illegal traders have received another big boost to their profits.

Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s inflationary hike in alcohol and tobacco duties enables criminals in the dark economy to raise their prices accordingly – and pocket the increase instead of giving it to the Treasury.

The massive scale of illicit trade means that the 74 cent increase in a packet of cigarettes alone is worth an extra R30 million a year to counterfeiters

MADAM & EVE and smugglers.

Crooks selling illicit alcohol and fuel are enjoying similar windfalls.

A crackdown on illicit trade is long overdue.

These criminals are systematically looting R100 million a day from the state by stealing taxes across multiple sectors.

Those taxes should be spent on education, policing, health care and other essential services. Instead, they’re making crooks rich and even funding other criminal enterprises.

Tax Justice South Africa head

ACCORDING to a televised news item, Kgalema Motlanthe, our former makeshift president of 2008-2009, has described South Africa as the “epicentre” of the HIV/Aids pandemic with seven million affected and four million receiving treatment.

The main reason for these new infections, said Motlanthe, is older men having “intergenerational sex” with young women.

What does “intergenerational sex” mean? Does it mean that my having sex with a woman half my age (71) is verboten? If that is a sin, then Jacob Zuma has been sinning for a long time.

Politicians like Motlanthe are never short on fancy words when they address the media on some of their monumental failures as a government.

Do we know what the HIV/Aids treatment is costing the taxpayer? How much does the Health Department spend on dispensing free condoms at airport and university lavatories?

Those so-called students who burn down buildings at some of our institutions are not happy with the quality of the government-sponsored condoms. They have been demanding designer condoms.

Twenty years ago, we were condomising to such an extent that we could have re-named South Africa “Condom Nation”. I recall seeing a display of 1 000 or more rolled condoms on the floor of the Workshop Shopping Centre in Durban.

Little children were wondering if they were some new brand of balloons, while adults pretended not to notice this assault on their senses.

Condomising and passing liberal laws like lowering the age of consensual sex have failed us.

If we don’t confront the subject of responsible sex together with uncontrolled procreation, our country will never extricate itself from its economic mess.

Let us blame apartheid for the last time: our casual approach to sex might be attributed to the migrant labour system, but as a 21st century society we need to look forward.

I think state institutions like the public broadcaster are not doing enough to bring this message home to our people.

Sandton

By Stephen Francis & Rico