The Bahamian government has released the country’s annual budget.
In a nutshell, Recurrent Revenue is projected at $1,490 billion and Recurrent Expenditure is estimated to be $1,465 billion. Staggering indeed as it seems like only yesterday that a minister of finance was proudly proclaiming the country’s first billion dollar budget. Now spending has increased to almost 1.5 billion and climbing! All this with an ever increasing national debt load.
It was Nikita Krushchev of all people that said “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.”
Judging from the increases in spending in this new budget it looks like he was correct.
To give credit where it is due, the Minister of State for Finance did emphasize in his speech that the FNM is promising a balanced budget. To state that alone is a step in the right direction. Now their feet can be held to the proverbial fire on that issue.
The following cartoon by Cox & Forkum while referring to spending by the US Congress, is certainly relevant to this discussion.
Click on image to enlarge.
The FNM have also made a commitment to a Judiciary that is free of political influence and this is crucial so they deserve congratulations on this.
Now for the kicker. A big deal was made of how much they have increased spending for education and several other areas they believe are key to fulfilling their promises. But they were short on ways to improve education, like Milton Friedman’s voucher idea or anything else for that matter. In other words, the country will, in all probably, continue to throw good money after bad.
It is easy to be an armchair quarterback of course, but until governments, either PLP or FNM, release education and other publicly funded ministries or departments and allow them to be more private sector oriented, one wonders if there will ever be an improvement.
As Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy wrote: “Good ideas, however, have a way of resisting attempts to quash them. Bad ideas sooner or later fail and teach a valuable lesson or two in the process.”
Let’s hope this is the case for the hundreds of Bahamian kids that receive a less than adequate education.
It’s a real tragedy when government programmes fail and our country’s leaders just think adding more tax payer money will solve the problem. As people in business know correcting long term problems requires a bit more thinking than that.
Maybe, just maybe, this FNM government will prove me wrong, but I don’t see a commitment to reduce waste in government spending in the presentations so far.
What do you think?
