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It is a good habit to not respond to loaded questions, right?
Hmmm? 
Especially looking at the thumbnail/title of the video,
it is pretty obvious that intent of the “content creator”
is to creat clickbait and trigger outrage.
Also FWIW, apparenlty the complete quote (being taken out of context) is -
“A sleeping partner cannot answer sitting here.”
which was provided in a direct response to a broker who said that the brokers are the ones who invest money and take risks, but the government becomes a sleeping partner and earns through various taxes including GST, IGST, Stamp duty, STT, STCG-tax/LTCG-tax.
Naaah. i beg to differ. 
IMHO, the Do NOT feed the trolls is a justified approach.
Attempting to engage in productive discussion with such folks in good faith, is almost always a waste of time, and disrespectful to others (in a shared public session) with genuine actionable concerns.
Of course, there are instances where one needs to win in the eyes of public media.
However, it appears that the FM was not insecure enough that she would feel the need to justify herself publicly.
Also, in addition to taxes being levied as a source of income,
taxes are also used as a lever to control the economy.
i.e. to disincentivize any behaviour deemed detrimental.
Sorry - rant - wont continue further.
Don’t expect much from them, taxes on markets keep getting raised step by step whether its fair or not.
In return, what we get is bad water, no real social security for people in trouble, bad air, now it seems food has risks too.
Focus seems to be on slogans and catch phrases, buying opposition leaders or jailing them, joke of a press, just keep saying modi modi and development development, ayush, mandir etc etc.
Never liked politicians, modi gave false hope.
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This is a reality already affecting most metros and Tier-1 cities.
Relatively higher wages / income in such cities is a false mirage
when the cost of basic necessities (clean food, water, air, land) keeps growing faster.
I hope you are NOT falling prey to the fundamental attribution error
and jumping to the conclusion that anyone with a contrary opinion is a blind-faith-moron
and dismissing any opinion that is contrary to yours as “BFS”.
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- Business with high risk should’t have so many taxes
- Tax should be charged while exiting the trade only if the trade is in profit. If its in loss, my loss is someone else profit. so either way someone will pay the tax.
Current reality is day robbery that both the person who wins and loose have to pay tax.
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there is one more tax that is income tax - even we pay all tax like
STT
GST
security transaction tax
Gift Tax
State stamp paper Tax
property Tax
water tax
indirect tax
CGST tax
even after govt is looking our empty pocket if any thing remaining means -INCOME TAX
india is a poor country but tax making indian to be poor forever
current govt is focus on sucking tax from comman man only
i will never file income tax - why i need to file - i already paying all tax
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Not applicable for Indian government. Really there’s too much getting taxed.
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There’s a difference between filing and paying taxes. Those who earn less than basic exemption limit can also file taxes but they need not pay anything
Lol health/term insurance is at 18% GST.
Very detrimental to economy right, safeguarding your future.
Car is at ~50% tax after factoring in everything. Roaming around with your family very detrimental indeed.
I don’t think you’ll find even 10 people in the entire country satisfied with the return on tax paid (among tax paying citizens)
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A taxpayer seeking relief from high Taxes is a Troll?
What is our Tax money used for? Advertisements and buying MLA’s
There is a plethora of taxes, some visible many other taxes are actually invisible. Apart from Taxes, Tax laws are such that and departmental harassments is even worse.
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IMHO, the framing by the broker ignores the investment in the underlying infrastructure and the economy itself, and hence is either naive or trolling.
In a public forum with the FM,
where other individuals presumably had genuine issues to highlight, concerns to flag, and questions to ask and receive responses to,
isn’t this unactionable naive/trolling question wasting taxpayers’ money and time?
The video / thumbnail caption further editorializes the quote out of context to make it sound outrageous.
i am not sure how abolishing taxes will help here until the underlying issues (eg. with unethical/corrupt individuals, some in power, others in waiting) are fixed. They will simply create alternate ways to fund what an abolished tax is currently funding.
And since the underlying issues are the root-cause,
why bother focusing on the strawman argument of “abolish taxes”.
Especially when some of the taxes are doing genuine good in the economy and society.
This has not been my experience.
If anything, it has gotten simpler and easier over the years.
So far, i am happy to pay the taxes i do,
in exchange for the (relative) stability and peace of mind offered
in an otherwise volatile and uncertain world.
PS: anyone reading this, i am NOT questioning your personal experience.
- Just trying to highlight that there are other points to consider as well.
- i hope you will agree that
“taxes = bad” is too simple of an over-generalization
that doesn’t help make progress towards actionable improvements.
As always, additional counterpoints are welcome. 
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Does anybody foresee an alternative arrangement where the entire indian securities market is shifted to some other country where there are no or minimal taxes. People are highly innovative.
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Indeed. The concept of tax havens is not new.
However, over the recent years,
the general direction that India, and most other economies, are going in,
is to restructure taxation and forex laws
to nullify the advantages of moving one’s profits to tax-havens.
Do you trade actively and make money from it ? How big is STT component as tax for you? I am guessing that most of your gains from market come as capital gain. Then ofc, you will be happy as you are subsidized - CG is subsidized by STT. Everyone is happy when others pay taxes.
And taxation in higher brackets does kinda suck too.
Combined with STT and other transaction taxes, i pay more than 50% of income on tax for what i consider to be not large income. Atleast relatively. India is poor yes but if i want to leave the country ( not for taxes ), then purchasing power shrinks drastically.
Not saying taxes are bad, but higher brackets starts too early and inflation keeps making it worse. Less than 20k $ and already above 33%.
And then you look at exemption for agriculture and others. No limit exception. yeah right.
In return, we don’t get much if you compare against good countries. Lack of public investment into education and health care as % of gdp tells it all. Bad air, bad water. Slow judiciary. Less police per capita. etc etc etc.
Perhaps we can be happy by comparing against pakistan.
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I’m in that catagory. 100% of my money comes from.CG. Not only taxes, evem my brokerage gets subsidised by f&o traders as I enjoy zero brokerage on delivery trades by discount brokers.
Until now, I used to say nobody should even look at f&o as its a loss making proposition for majority. But you gave me a reason to support f&o traders. Fron now on, I’ll support them. The more the number of these traders, better for me.
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hehe, as i said everyone is happy when others pay their taxes.
People complaining are the ones who pay.
Anyway, trading and investing are not exclusive so we can do that too and i will in future.
At some point it will make more sense to reduce work rather than pay more taxes and accept lower returns. Plus we can pledge anyway.
Or move out of country and gain access to large number of markets which is denied to us right now because of weak currency.
@SpacemanSpiff
You forgot to highlight that trading is what enables investors to successfully invest
by providing a market that has
- proper price discovery
- sufficient liquidity
i.e. creating/ensuring a market that supports economic growth and stability
by helping transfer wealth
from the ones who save
to the ones that can utilize it productively.
Traders provide add a certain amount of value into the overall system,
and hence are appropriately compensated for it.
(the gains from active trading)
However, once the necessary conditions are met,
stuffing additional traders into the same market is of no added value.
If anything, these additional traders are a negative value
as they further divide the compensation the market is willing to bear
within more traders.
(i.e. what was previously a sustainable activity, is no longer worth it for existing traders)
Do you remember someone once said - “Poverty is a state of mind”.
Please don’t prove them right! 
Highest income-tax slab for someone in the top 5% income, sounds quite reasonable.
[ Source ]
The way i see it is that the folks in charge of the nation are being pretty smart about it.
Ultimately one must ensure food-security of the nation.
Hence, i believe taxing agricultural income appropriately will be attempted last.
i.e. agriculture will be taxed appropriately once there is nowhere else for the participants to switch to even in the short-term and put the nation’s food-security at risk.
For an entertaining look into how taxing and regulating agriculture in a modern economy can have unintended side-effects and destroy the agriculture sector, do checkout Clarkson’s Farm.
Otherwise (eg. if it was done today in India),
i can see lacs of “farmers” stopping cultivating land and becoming social-media influencers or worse yet “financial traders” to earn a livelihood and destroy both the food-security, as well as the financial markets with extreme swings/speculations/scams.
Reminds me of this scene from The Life of Bryan (1979). 
Apart from
the sanitation, the medicine, education,
wine, public-order, irrigation, roads, fresh-water, public-health,
…what have theRomanstaxes ever done for us!
if you compare against good countries.
Good point.
Do you think the folks in charge are improving on this front though?
i.e. are they getting better at emulating success stories of other nations wherever possible,
and tweaking them to suit the geo-political challenges of the current times
and coming-up with novel solutions required at the scale India needs.
Hmmm?
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Just what i think as a layman. I do not want to engage too much as i am no expert in these things but below is my perception of it.
Disagree strongly. Trading is a competitive activity and we get cyclical behavior as market participants compete. Edges will have cycles too and we can have multiple types of edges each with their own cycles.
yes i would love to have reduced competition, but market is not built for me alone. We do not have monopoly. People come, edges reduce, people leave, edges improve. So its about survival and doing better than most and adapting / changing as necessary. Markets don’t have to compensate all.
In the long run, my guess ( obviously) is that increasing participation increases efficiency slowly while still leaving space for above average returns for some. So we could make more returns earlier than today, same as Mutual funds that don’t beat the market as easily as yesterday. Time will tell but if we consider us markets as example, edges will remain.
Quite sad and also indicates massive failure of governments through all these years. But as a trader with so many restrictions on me, leaving country is desirable eventually ( so much regulation risk on top of that) and things like these are a big drag on attaining adequate capital, so i complain.
Now if everyone in top 5% were paying high tax rate, i could understand but that is not the case ( CG is very obvious - mostly made by richer people as a proportion of wealth - given most favorable treatment).
50%+ tax ( inc STT ) on me while making ( relatively) peanuts looks wrong to me.
I do not think this will ever happen due to vote bank politics.
Also, this logic makes no sense to me, most farmers are poor - no one is asking them to be taxed. And companies can step in too and be regulated reasonably. We can have state enterprises too. Obviously, this has to be done while taking care of the poorest of farmers and that cost is fine and justified.
Are you saying that other countries don’t tax agriculture income too to increase food security?
An unbounded tax free treatment is hardly fair and will only encourage tax evasion/money laundering by other people ( Amitabh Banchan got caught, how many others?) How many politicians have agricultural income ?
Religious income is the same. I remember hearing reports of religious income being used to whitewash black money during demonitization.
Most farmers are poor. And people dont stop making money because of taxes, else i would stop trading.
No one stops farmers from trading today and i remember a news report of some being scammed out of money which was causing regulatory pressure over api …
Sarcasm aside, there wont be much impact on financial markets if that happens, they are far too resilient and liquid. Too many people have started trading/investing and yet markets are much less volatile these days. They will become volatile again in future, i dont see them as related, just cyclical.
Disagree here.
Public investment in education and health from what i have heard/see is very low in India as a % of gdp. Water is polluted, why do we all use filters ? Rivers become nalas in this country.
Air is getting worse ( i have asthma/allergies). People burning fallen leaves in my area seems so stupid and happens because municipality does not pick it up for example.
These things affect poor the most.
For healthcare, we are dependent on private insurance rather than getting good public services. Have heard from father that this was not always the case, it used to be better earlier - atleast in his experience.
Insurance is bound on upside creating large uncertainty ( In europe have heard its opp) and that’s assuming all goes through. When in tense situations, we are supposed to provide documentation and follow rules to claim. Hospitals will have incentive to milk insurance creating distrust. Insurance guys have incentive to optimize and leave out people who are probably more vulnerable. You miss a year ( old people could do that ) and all past payments become void.
Disgustingly, had read report that private hospitals have much higher rate of caesarean birth etc etc.
Education - on average very low quality in my experience ( Mumbai university CS) right from start. Obviously there will be exceptions and exceptional people, but on average what we produce is large number of low skill people. I only really learnt in my job and some courses in coursera showed how much better it can be.
Low per capita police presence, decades long court cases etc etc.
Never said that we should not have taxes.
Anyway, i don’t want to rant more. I am doing well, and these things affect others more than me.
Dunno, doesnt look like to me in basic areas like above. Other things obv have gotten better, along with a more autocratic govt with heavy right wing agenda.
Hopefully will get good one day, ill probably be long dead by then.
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