Budget

The Barbados budget just came down and its pretty brutal. VAT going up, fees, bus fares all sorts of other taxes going up, taxes added. Lashes galore! Going to be a tight Christmas.

Well people, sadly things tight all over the world not just in Bim and with tourism our main money earner not doing that great these days, belts got to be tightened cause ya can only borrow for so long before ya got to pay back right? Unfortunately some of these belt tightening measures will disproportionally hit the most needy in our society like the poor and the pensioners but well star, I don't know what ya can really do about that besides hope that some of these measures temporary.

What I do always find interesting come budget time is how the party in opposition always finds a way to blame the current party when such belt tightening measures are necessary as indeed they do seem to be in this circumstance with the globe still deeply mired in recession. I guess that's the meaning of opposition but in particular today I find some of the comments about waste by the opposition BLP commentators to be rather disingenuous.

The numerous projects at Ilaro Court; the opening of the housing estate at Marchfield, St Philip; the three reshuffles, which necessitated change in stationery, labels and the like; the more than $10 million in summer camps between 2008 and 2009; the launch of the constituency councils; the subsidy to JetBlue and the recent female boxing championship were among the things on the list of “cardinal errors” Forde said the Government made.

Eh eh but allya really believe Bajans have short memories nuh? And maybe they do but umm we can't talk waste in Barbados without referring to the colossal waste of funds used for World Cup 2007.

And yes I tell wunnah from evasince (back when people used to read this blog) that hosting the world cup was going to hurt we financially. Ya doan believe me looka this post from 2006. And that was even before I hear that about half billion dollars spend in Barbados on world cup. And what did we benefit from that massive outlay of funds? And how much a those funds are still owed back to the people we borrowed from?

And who was running government then? Exactly!

So doan get tie up that the new government spend a few dollars for children summer camps to keep the youts off the road, occupied and out of the road this past year when the previous regime spent bigger dollars that haven't really benefited the country.

Folk get tied up in thinking that these financial predicaments that we find ourselves in usually occur rather quickly but if one really studies it, these things occur by a series of mistakes or bad fiscal moves over a longer period of time. How long the whole American mortgage drama was happening before the whole US housing market implode? Same thing here with Barbados, its not like things were great yesterday or last year and we woke up this morning struggling cause of one spending spree. Barbados was borrowing and spending for a long time beyond its means and its just now that it catching up to us.