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Content
A listing of transcripts of the dialogue and narrative of this section.
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Structure
The list provides the transcript, info about the text, and links to references contained in the text.
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Special Report
Transcripts for Section 3 of Episode 74
| Time | Summary | | | 30:25 | According to IMF statistics capital flight from South Africa reached a total of over 25 billion US dollars between 1990 and 1994. | Full Transcript | | 30:42 | We squandered the capital of the country. We indebted our children and if we take the decade of the eighties over three and a half million potential job applicants, I think a 186 000 jobs were created in the formal sector of which by the way more than a 100 percent were in the state and there was a net loss in the private sector. So, I’m glad that and I’m not sure that everybody in the room will disagree with that, but I’m glad that we got rid of two immoral attempts at social engineering in the last 10, 15 years, the one was communism and the other one was apartheid. | Full Transcript | | 31:38 | If you imagine a South Africa without apartheid from the decades of 1960 to 1990 it seems quite plausible to suggest that South Africa would have grown at Brazilian growth rates, rather than the ones that we did, and our economy would be twice the size that it is. | Full Transcript | | 31:53 | The policy of apartheid has made South Africa much poorer than the country and its people could otherwise have been. Lost and unutilized human potential, wasted resources, people and capital that left the country, growth that did not occur and jobs that were not created; all these, and many more examples prove that we are much poorer, not even to speak of the effect on the moral values of our society of apartheid. A poorer society simply means less business and fewer opportunities… | Full Transcript | | 32:33 | But what happens beyond words? What is the way forward for our country to repair and address the economic wrongs of the past? One of the most concrete suggestions was that of Stellenbosch Economics Professor, Sampie Terreblanche. He suggested that a wealth tax be levied on all South Africans with assets worth more than two million rand. This tax he says should be levied for the next ten to 20 years, but this proposal met with some fierce resistance in the press this past week. The ‘Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut’ also argued against it at the hearing. | Full Transcript and References | | 33:07 | Internationally wealth taxes are very complex; people avoid them, because capital becomes mobile especially if you relax exchange control and all kinds of other things. Second thing is that it is administrative … it is an administrative burden for an administration that has difficulty to collect the main taxes that we have in South Africa, being the consumption tax and the income tax. And thirdly, it is a further burden on savings, it’s a disincentive for people to save rather than consume. And we as a country, we have a lack of savings, so there are many arguments. I think the main thing is it is too complex, it is going to send the wrong type of signal and we already have a tax. If you say once in a lifetime I take 25 percent or I take half percent a year or whatever it’s just slicing it in a different way, but it’s the same tax base that you’re really going for. | Full Transcript | | 34:02 | My proposal for a wealth tax has caused quite a furore. As I could have suspected the proposal was made suspect by some by deliberately concentrating only on the disadvantages of such a tax without acknowledging the dire need to restore systemic and social justice after a hundred years of structural impoverishment and enrichment. It is high time that especially the rich should realize that the South African poverty problem and the South African wealth problem are not two separate problems, but two sides of the same problem. | Full Transcript and References | | 34:41 | Although the ‘Handelsinstituut’ was one of those to criticize the wealth tax, they were the only ones to come with some kind of alternative. They suggest that the old South African Security Risk Insurance Fund, which was used to insure people against political violence in the past, be used for the reparation of victims of apartheid now. This fund is worth nine billion rand. // After the short break, a special documentary about what really happened during the 1981 Seychelles coup attempt. | Full Transcript |
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