Rick Lowe
Tribune Business featured an interview with Mr. Zhivargo Laing, Minister of State for Finance to get his response to a recent report by Moody's Investor Service about the debt levels of The Bahamas.
While your not so humble blogger understands, and even agrees with many of Mr. Laing's comments, and commend him for finally changing his tune, I'm still left with an emptiness about it all.
He glosses over the fact that government spends far too much. Much more than they collect in taxes. That's not lack of revenue, that's lack of fiscal responsibility.
In the private sector we can only get away with doing that for short periods of time. Our successive governments have been doing that every year since 1967, and now all the political class can think of is getting more taxes from the citizens?
Well that's, oh what the heck, bull shit!
Cut spending, waste and corruption in government like you mean it first!
One good place to start is by closing embassies and selling off the properties all over the world. Do we honestly need them?
How about cutting travel to all those symposiums around the world with large entourages for a while? Go To Meeting over the Internet works just great for the private sector. Why can't it work for bureaucrats and politicos?
Then look at combining Government Ministries. Do we really need all the Cabinet Ministers and attendant costs for vehicles and chauffeurs etc that we have?
With a debt to GDP ratio, including contingent liabilities near 54% Mr. Laing seems to be more focused on expanding the tax base rather than cutting government spending and reducing it's size and scope, which is what got us into this mess in the first place!
See why I'm left feeling empty about this. In essence, Mr. Laing knows that government is not fiscally responsible, witness BahamasAir alone, but Parliament can only see one way to fix it.
And how is that? You guessed it. Stick it to the taxpayer and wealth creators! But it's the business class and private citizens that have taken this recession on the nose, not the Government. They are able to borrow, when the rest of us are cut off.
However, history proves that with higher government taxes comes even higher spending, so raising taxes should be the last resort with Constitutional caps on total debt to GDP and taxation.
Maybe I'm felling a little more than just empty about this, would you say?
