In her commentary on the tax reform and new tax proposals, Ana Mitila Lora deals with the plight of Dominicans today in the Listin Diario. She observes that consumers, especially those on a salary, suffer quietly, barely murmuring any protest at all the blows they receive daily. She mentions: the 18-hour blackouts, amen; the increases in the power bills, amen; the deficiency in water services that oblige the purchase of water from a cistern truck (while still having to pay what the meter reads), amen; the peso?s appreciation, but how this is not reflected in the price of rice, yucca, eggs, cheese and other items whose costs continuously escalate, amen? She also laments how citizens are mistreated when they need a public service. She leaves aside the public hospitals, for the time being, and trains her focus instead on the civil registry offices. She says citizens are being punished for needing a birth certificate, having to stand in one long lineup to request the document and then another to retrieve it. And she urges that judges and government officials need not purchase so many costly SUVs a year, nor talk so much on their cell phones, nor use so much gasoline? Instead, she urges that the country invest its attentions in eradicating the chaos and respecting its citizenry. She wonders who invented the new system in which birth certificates are only valid for three months, and begs that an ?open-heart surgery? be performed on this State, which currently only serves to torture its populace, the very same people it expects to pay its taxes!
anamitila@hotmail.com