Paeng, indeed. well put!

my question still stands: In a country where collecting income tax is such a chore and largely inefficient— from the point of view of government, VAT is the best way to collect taxes. which begs the question— if government would eliminate income taxes all together and instead focus their attention to VAT what effect will that do to say, inflation or government’s bottom line? Economists in the house?

At the end of the day, i think that is why government is so focused on VAT. it is easier to collect taxes than go after income taxes or improve tax collection.

But the more important question is, did this mother of all flapping change the fundamental nature of our society?

If not (and I think a lot of people agree that things haven’t changed at all fundamentally — different names, diferent year, same old shit), then I doubt if one SONA speech or even ten will change anything.

the math eludes me of course— i’m not that smart but i was thinking that the small changes we can make now, individually=initial conditions? would it be therefore possible, if everyone just did their own thing, “kanya kanyang sikap,” would that be akin to flapping a butterfly’s wing? would it ultimately change our social norms, our country’s economic prospects and raise the nature of our politics?

Did anything change from PGMA’s speech yesterday? nothing. again like i said, it isn’t hope that we need. we have that in spades. it is courage to really make the touch choices

The butterfly-flapping-its-wings thing comes from Chaos Theory (math). The analogy first became “mainstream” in Micheal Crichton’s novel “Jurassic Park”. ;)