Death & Taxes - The two truths of Life
We spend all our life optimising the latter, the former just catches up one fine day
It has been a while since I wrote something.
Dealing with death is not something anyone teaches you about and yet, one fine day it hits you.
I am not talking about personal death, there is no way you will be able to understand how it comes, how it hits you and whether you can even express how you feel about it but this is to do with the death that often hits you for someone who has been close to you.
A friend, a parent, a grandparent, a sibling - anyone you have held close, maybe ran into a meeting or just knew they existed.
Ever since my father passed away, I took some time off things - started off with mourning his absence then moved on to remembering and recreating memories and activities we would do together.
After a lot of starts and stops especially with reading and writing about investing and markets, it finally hit me - what would he have wanted?
Well, the show must go on.
Which brings me to the biggest financial event all of us love to watch and see - The Budget!
Over the years, the budget has slowly moved into becoming a non-event - most of the taxes all of us end up paying are indirect and the GST council keeps meeting throughout the year to decide whether water, sugar and carbonated drinks (which is sugar and water mixed with CO2) be taxed at the same rates?
However, if I were to break down this year’s budget, I would see dissection in 3 broad parts -
1 - The part of big allocations on infrastructure, railways, agriculture, green energy etc - big numbers thrown here and there, higher the allocation better it is for the economy. How?
It is called Multiplier effect.
Think of you spending 100 rupees to construct a bridge.
You spend money on buying cement, steel and labour.
Labour gets wages - they go and spend it on buying items for consumption, production of those items go up, companies then start thinking of setting up new factories.
Now replace 100 with thousands of crores and one bridge with multiple bridges, roads, rail networks, solar plants etc.
2 - Financial Inclusion push through Digital Stack - The idea behind expanding the use of multiple layers w.r.t. the common India stack that India has built - collectively mentioned as Digital Public Goods or DPG.
Against the west where a lot of digital push and inclusion was largely driven by ensuring advertising dollar per capita keeps going, this would have never been possible in India.
India took an approach to drive digital push through micro transactions and once the use of UPI blitzscaled, we were able to build on top.
Jut for context - in 70 years of independence, we reached 7mn POS machines, in the last 3 years, we reached 50 mn QR codes!
What about the budget - Digilocker for corporates. If you have recently travelled by air to Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai or Varanasi, DigiYatri would have given you a VVIP treatment.
3 - Finally, a tax cut for the salaried class - A section of society that really has nothing to manoeuver, pays tax honestly, never gets any special treatment and yet every year is left with nothing. For the first time, there was a tax cut provided albeit subject to foregoing deductions which in due course could be a thing of the past.
I shall be resuming the premium webinars soon from the end of this month. The pipeline is as under:
1 - A relatively undervalued FMCG company cementing it’s leadership position
2 - A small low - ticket consumption item taking strides into increasing distribution
3 - Breaking down ONDC
4 - A quasi-play on consumer spends and formalisation of Indian economy
Let me know what excites you from all 4 of them and we shall be moving them up.
Note for existing premium subscribers: In case your subscription has expired, the same shall be extended by requisite number of days since the webinars were put on pause.