EDITORIAL - Taxes should be borne by everyone

Malacañang has reportedly grown a soft underbelly for the exemption of minimum wage earners from taxes. Fine, nothing wrong with that. The lowest paid among us certainly deserve some break, and this could be it.

But at whose expense will this break be? To be sure, those just a few notches above the economic ladder than minimum wage earners are not drastically any better off. But they will now have to be part of the sector that will have to subsidize and compensate for the revenue loss.

Some say taxes can be argued both ways. We go along with the notion that taxes are needed or at least are a necessary evil. But our tolerance for evil goes only up to that point where taxes are not only justifiably equitable but also productive for everyone.

Unfortunately, a huge chunk of what most people pay in taxes never make it to the national coffers, ending up instead in the pockets of those who are corrupt, and thus never get to be plowed back to the people in the form of services.

This makes the situation very difficult for those who do pay taxes. It is bad enough already that much of the taxes that do get paid in this country do not go where they are intended but somehow get waylaid by the evil and the corrupt.

It is worse when those who do pay taxes end up having to make up for the losses incurred from fresh exemptions granted to wage-earners who are in fact no far worse than others who are only just slightly higher in the income brackets.

Indeed, this system of computing taxes according to income brackets is grossly unfair and unwise. A person who earns just five pesos more than the minimum wage will have to bear the brunt of taxes that the minimum wage earner will henceforth be exempted from paying.

Yet the five-peso difference that separates those who will pay taxes and those who will not is no difference at all in the economic scale of things. Five godforsaken pesos will not make someone any better off than another.

The burden of keeping the country afloat by means of taxes must be shared by everyone through a more equitable means of computing taxes. Instead of lumping salary scales according to tax brackets, there should be a corresponding tax level for every peso earned in income.