The union budget 2018-19 presented yesterday was surprisingly a budget for rural people, rather than an election based one, and aims to as usual benefit corporate while snubbing general public. The 2018-19 union budget was presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley for about 1 hour and 50 minutes, and as common people had wanted, there was no modification to the tax exemption threshold for salaried employees, and this was a huge disappointment.
While it was expected that corporate taxes will be reduced from 30 to 25%, the central government has modified it on the basis of revenues, and for companies up to 250 Crores revenues, the corporate tax has been set to 25%, which is sure to help developing and small scale companies. The medical and transportation expenses standard deduction for senior citizens has been revised to 50000 and the standard deduction for salaried citizens has been fixed at 40000. On the lines of former American president Barack Obama's Obama care, the central government has tried its own version of Modi care, with the announcement that government will take care of the medical expenses up to 5 lakh for 10 crore poor families, and free medical insurance for those 10 crore families as well.
However the budget was of no help for small and medium
scale enterprises, as they're already crippled by GST, and except 4.6 lakh
crore allocation for Mudra loans and a loan target of 3 lakh crores, no
announcements were made. With such announcements made in the union budget, the
general public won't be benefited much, as the beneficiaries are going to be
only the corporate and the corporate middlemen and agents.
