Talking to friends, family and associates everybody has a family member not working making life very hard compared to times past.
These issues coupled with the fact that the cost of living is very high anyway people have to make hard choices where to spend limited resources so one can understand getting into arrears at the electricity company.
At the same time, when financial difficulty strikes it seems cut backs on luxury items like Cable, cell service etc might need to be made to make every effort to keep the lights on.
But in The Bahamas some in the political class see the public treasury as a trough to dip into for a bail out for some 3,000 accounts that are in arrears at BEC.
Furthermore those thousands of BEC customers that pay their electricity bill month in and month out, year in and year out get absolutely zero consideration.
In fact the Government seems to delight in raising taxes and charges on those trying to pay while heaping benefits on those that do not pay.
This giveaway at BEC is just the latest. We've seen it happen with property tax and business license taxes.
As a friend remarked recently, we have an unstructured welfare state that is financially destroying those that do the right thing.
Providing long term finance plans to pay the arrears off interest free or the like might be worthy of consideration, but to just write them off at everyone else's expense is beyond the pale.
So why pay taxes and government corporations for your bills if you can ultimately get the services for free?
