Reactions to the budget
The budget for 2009 was presented by Trevor Manuel, The Minister Finance, yesterday.
These are some of the reactions to it from the newspapers.
The Times looked at it from a personal perspective. They interviewed an 84 year old grandmother from Soweto who felt that the increase in social spending would be a big bonus for her and enable her to put food on her family table.
She spends most of her pension income on electricity and water bills. Even this small increase of R50 will make a big difference in her life.
The Times then had a related article, also from the personal perspective of a Johannesburg mother who is employed as a real estate agent. She was feeling the pinch with the slowdown in the homeloan market and was happy about the personal tax relief.
She did however call for targeted and transparent taxes. As she put it 'I don't mind paying taxes that will go to social grants. In fact, it would be stupid for us not to pay for the poor, but I don't think the system is monitored well enough'.
If you knew that for every rand of tax collected by the Government that x cents would be spent on y then many more people would feel less antipathy to handing their money over to the government.
iAfrica reported this from Uncle Trev 'the key to budget planning is striking a balance and not just giving money away'.
An example of this is the conditions that are attached to getting child support grants ensuring that the child must be in education to qualify. Manuel put it like this 'there must be long-term benefits and it must not be dependence-producing'. These comments came from the Lion of Africa conference that took place in Cape Town.
There was another article on iAfrica that looked specifically at the budget speech and its major details calling it a 'bailout Budget'.
A third iAfrica article carried comment from an economist calling the budget 'very realistic'. The same economist said that 'While social expenditure was large, it was not out of proportion'. The issue of tax cuts however were welcome although barely enough to start addressing inflation.
Fin24 carried a number of articles looking at the Budget and where Trevor Manuel thinks we will be going. He said that it is critical to keep the economy alive, although we are not in a recession the risk was still present and that the government were aware of this.
Fin24 looked at the R13.6 billion in personal tax relief and found that experts were in general happily surprised by the scale of it, especially considering the bad business climate at the moment.
Bua News published the full text of the speech.
Justmoney will be continuing its coverage of the budget but in the meantime why don't you try out our handy budget planning tool, so you too can know where your finances stand.
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