Indian Budget 2024

The general consensus is that this budget imposes a heavy burden on middle- to lower-middle-class families. I will share more excerpts from the Budget as I read it, but the major issues concerning the middle class seem to be as follows: 

1. They removed the indexation on the property tax. This means that inflation is not considered when calculating the tax that should be paid to the government when you sell your property. 

2. The long-term capital gains are taxed even further. This would surely hurt the investments and stock market as newcomers are more likely to not come due to the excessive taxation. 

3. Minister Raghav Chaddha argued in the parliament that Indian govt taxes like western countries and provides infrastructure like sub-saharan countries. 

4. Unemployment was one of the highly cited reason for the low vote turnout for the ruling party and they seem to have taken some steps. Many sectors are incentivized to hire freshers with low taxes. There is a peculiar provision where the fresh hire would get one month's salary as a bonus. I don't know what this achieves but good for them. 

5. I would like to see "all the black money" collected during note ban put to some use to improve the infrastructure in the country. 

6. It looks like most funds went to Bihar for reconstruction. Andhra was made some random promises to get 15000 crores for constructing the capital but with T & C. Nobody knows what those are. More drama to unfold here. See Shashi Tharoor's speech in Parliament on Budget 2024.. 

7. Several states, including West Bengal and Tamil Nadu accused that no funds were allocated to those states on account of BJP not being elected from there. See Shashi Tharoor's speech here.

There are two main themes that I perceive from this. Try to follow my logic. The ruling party obviously doesn't want India to develop. Prosperity reduces conflict. Then you can't anger voters based on "mutton" and "mangal sutra", am I right? 

The news media doesn't ask any questions. The few print media that ask fall on deaf ears. The finance minister is acting so smug to be honest. This was also demonstrated when an audience member asked them about why there is GST and SGST and an additional capital gains tax on the investment. What are we earning then? Here's a link to that video.