Atatürk's thoughts on finance and the budget

Atatürk focused on two paths for the party. For a party that made it its business to stand firmly on these two principles and resolve them no matter what, he reached the following conclusion:

A balanced budget and regular payments. This is the root of finance. There can be no worse practice than a budget created by matching revenue to expenditures with mere numbers.

Expecting balance from such a budget is a fantasy. Budget balance and regular payments are the heart of finance. In a state where these two are absent, public services falter, credit declines, and economic affairs are shaken.

This is why the party saw only one path for a balanced budget. It is to adopt a careful attitude toward the expenditure budget, preventing unnecessary, groundless, and useless spending, incorporating thrift into every state affair, and ultimately adjusting expenditures to match revenue.

Just as he saw regular payments as necessary for the treasury, he also asked citizens to follow this path in their taxes. This is a justified request.

What is a tax? It does not mean citizens giving money to feed parasites or this person or that. Tax is the citizen's participation in public services and state affairs. Taxes have no other meaning. For the state collects taxes only and exclusively to be spent on the sovereignty of the nation, the development of the country, the trust and welfare of the citizen, the protection of the homeland, and for war. For this reason, the citizen should strive to pay taxes regularly without hesitation or reluctance. Through regular payment, the citizen protects the budget balance. Thus, state affairs proceed in an orderly fashion.

The citizen must pay as regularly as they wish. For, even if the citizen struggles to pay as regularly as they wish, no benefit can be expected when tax laws are chaotic; such a structure, or tax laws not based on economic principles, creates a thousand kinds of difficulties every day. For this reason, the party set out to improve and harmonize tax laws. Collecting taxes under various names that do not conform to any scientific basis—which was a very pathetic practice in the past—and these practices, which were thought to have been corrected recently, were still not free from the bad habits of the past. The tax practices applied to citizens were so varied and complex that our financial organizations could not find their way out of them. On the other hand, the tax-paying citizen suffered and could not manage to pay regularly. This should not be attributed to the citizen's reluctance or avoidance in tax matters. No, the corruption of tax practices, the inability to organize the implementation of tax laws, the convoluted ways of assessing, collecting, and gathering taxes, and the lack of experts in the Ministry of Finance who were technically sound and enlightened by financial knowledge are the main reasons for this confusion. As a result, the focus was on the fact that tax practices were stagnant and lacked tools, out of fear of not being able to collect taxes, or more accurately, out of the concern of not being able to find revenue to cover the anticipated expenses.

While both sides knew that this created many, many difficulties for the treasury as well as for the tax-paying citizen, the state could not turn away from this path. The root of this issue lies in the fact that new and creative principles have not yet been adopted in financial affairs, and financial matters have not been able to escape the hands of the spider-headed administrators of the past.

Taking this into account, the Party clearly stated in its program that practices should be turned toward essential and equipped foundations and requested that financial laws be drafted in this direction.

In customs matters, previously, nothing could be thought of other than just collecting customs duties. The Republic state, considering that goods passing through customs should not become a plague on the country and an additional burden on the citizen's back, adopted a principle based on this. Creating a tariff suitable for the nation's economic interests—this core idea is the most definitive task for a customs tariff. We can say with pride that it is these tariffs that settle and expand the national economy a little more every day. The Party wanted to put this into a form more suitable for our nation's benefit and embarked on that path. There is a dark plague in customs and technical affairs: Smuggling!

A smuggler is not an ordinary thief. They are a base traitor who steals from the nation and steals from the state. Smuggling is an evil thing that causes much material and moral damage to the state, the nation, and the treasury. Against this, the party has initiated a war to crush it without mercy until this disgusting business is rooted out. Its roots will be dried up.

Prof. Dr. Duran BÜLBÜL