Editorial
In functioning states, taxation is a covenant. Citizens pay their dues and the state delivers in return: schools that teach, hospitals that heal, roads that connect, courts that adjudicate, and utilities that work. The tax receipt is, in effect, a promise. Where that promise holds, compliance follows naturally. Where it does not, resistance is not mere defiance — it is a rational response to broken faith.
Pakistan’s tax problem is not fundamentally about rates or brackets. It is about legitimacy. Ordinary Pakistanis look at what their taxes produce and find little comfort. Revenues disappear into debt servicing, IMF conditionalities, inflated government operations, and the quiet maintenance of elite privilege. What remains for the citizen is a state stripped of its basic obligations: crumbling government schools, dysfunctional public hospitals, potholed roads, and a judicial maze that exhausts rather than resolves.
Into this void, the government has piled expensive electricity, costly gas, and rising fuel prices — burdens carried disproportionately by those who can least afford them. The wealthy navigate around state failure through private schools, private hospitals, and private security. The poor have no such exit. They bear the cost without receiving the benefit. Under these conditions, demanding tax compliance is not reform — it is provocation.
The state cannot build a tax culture through enforcement alone. Trust must come first. That means visible fiscal discipline, genuine accountability for public spending, and measurable improvement in the services citizens actually use. Until a Pakistani can point to a government school worth attending or a hospital worth trusting, the moral authority behind taxation remains hollow.
Taxation is ultimately a question of governance and social justice. The revenue problem and the service delivery problem are the same problem. Solve one, and the other begins to resolve itself.
