One of the best pieces of advice I ever received in speech and debate was never to pick religion or the economy as topics for extemporaneous speaking. The first would trigger knee-jerk emotional reactions, the second would put judges to sleep. If we were ever stuck with bad choices, such as abortion, the death penalty or the deficit, we settled for the deficit, memorized some economic humor and hoped for the best.

So the wall-to-wall media attention to the Indian budget last week struck me as bizarre. New Delhi released the budget to 20-page special sections in mainstream newspapers about taxes on gram and cement and Anna Nicole-like coverage on TV. The minutiæ of spreadsheets got more coverage than 9/11. It’s especially strange in a town like Bombay where the papers are essentially tabloids printing photos of the same ten celebrities. It’s like they photograph a stock set of parties in January and run the same photos throughout the year. And nobody would know the difference.

I asked some Bombay friends about this, and they say that the reason is that the state has so many fingers in the economic pie that the budget actually affects your day-to-day life. The government sets prices for commodities like onions, potatoes and cement. They slammed finance minister P. Chidambaram for bad economics, excessive taxation and condescending to interviewers.

He studied at Presidency College, Chennai… and studied law at the Law College of the University of Madras, Chennai… He later went to Harvard Business School… He represented the bankrupt American energy giant Enron as a senior lawyer in India, and is… set to revive its Dhabol power project… [Link]

The irrepressible Shobhaa De recently described Finance Minister P. Chidambaram as “the sexiest man in India”. [Link]

For example, Chidambaram extended a fringe benefits tax to corporate travel. By arguing that salarymen enjoy getting up at 6 in the morning and dragging their kundis to the airport for a 9 am meeting in Bangalore, Chidambaram shows he’s never held a real job. By treating an expense as income, Chidambaram is committing a miscarriage of economics.

The friends also singled out a tax on high-tech stock options and a steep excise tax on cement exports to relieve a domestic shortage. But since construction projects have long lead times, cement demand is relatively inelastic. The only effect of the excise tax is to force domestic buyers to pay more, exactly the opposite of what the minister intended.

Theere was also some discussion about how the reason farmers have a low effective tax rate is not because of the spate of farmer suicides, but because many politicians and celebrities launder black-market cash through fields which remain fallow.

I’m one of the lost souls who enjoys this sort of stuff, so if you’ve been following the Indian national budget over the last few years, I have two things to say. First, my condolences — please don’t ever invite me to your house And second, do share your analyses in the comments.