Tax holiday for fresh graduates or first-time employees

May I extend my congratulations to Sen. Ralph Recto and Rep. Miro Quimbo for their sensible legislative proposals relating to the needs of the economy and the need to mitigate the burden to our taxpayers.

I am sure they may want to consider a proposal to a 3-year tax holiday or at least a very low income tax assessment for fresh college graduates or first-time employees for the first three years of their employment.

My proposal stems from the fact that we need to hasten the increase in the number of our middle class. Certainly, among the reasons for taxation is to control wealth. However, fresh college graduates or first-time employees do not have that wealth of their own and considering that they seldom have dependents, a big chunk of their earnings is deducted for tax purposes at the time that they need to grow economically.

My daughter works in a five-star hotel and gets her share of the service charge, but is not paid overtime pay when most of the time she has to work more than 12 hours. Some say it is standard practice in the hotel business, but I am sure that she and her coworkers are abused a lot because the hotel is not reinforcing its work force. At the end of each 15-day work, around P5,000 is deducted from her pay for a total of around P10,000 monthly. I hope our respected legislators would want to take a look at this, too!

—MARIANO R. SANTIAGO,

[email protected]