A year of wins

January 6, 2025

ISLAMABAD – ALL is well that ends well. The year 2024 was no different. For Pakistan, it was a year of marked stability: inflation was dragged down, rather heroically, to the single digits. While prices continued to incre­ase, making basic necessities even more unaffordable for the poor, who cared as long as we could say, “The fire of inflation has been tamed!”. It is not like the ordinary person is able to make sense of the full implications of that claim. Credit the many successes of our education system.

We also increased tax collection, mainly by increasing the number of middle-class tax filers and squeezing every bit of their incomes by increasing the tax rates on their teeny-tiny salaries. It’s not like people need to send their kids to private schools when we have built so many public schools for them. Yes, it was a difficult step to take politically, but what other option did we really have to offset the increase in government expenditures? It is not like urban property tax or corporate taxes were an option — I mean, did we really want to upset the elite for something as trivial as a balanced budget?

Investment remained low, but don’t blame the government. We begged all our rich foreign friends to invest in Pakistan, even dressed up nicely in our best-branded suits, donning our best accessories to make a good impression. But it is, indeed, all Imran Khan’s fault: there has been so much instability in our country since the day he was born that nobody wants to invest. Also, why can’t people forget about him already? We have given them a new national hero, the great Arshad Nadeem, whom “we” discovered at our youth festival and trained year after year with all the necessary world-class equipment. Talk