Our public officials tell us revenue is the problem so we need a Value Added Tax (VAT).
Seems they might have some difficulty reading their own numbers?
Spending looks like the problem to me, so heaven knows what form(s) of taxation will follow the failure of VAT.
Do you have any ideas?
By the way, these numbers are as at 2012 and the National Debt is now over $5.2 Billion, excluding contingent liabilities.
No doubt about it,spending is the problem big time.Maybe if the government made some collections from their cronies & stopped the mad spending we might get somewhere.Its just like the US.Neither party claims to want a deficit yet they have a deficit ! Go figure……. The simple answer I think is they are signing us up for the VAT so they could have more money to piss away,no more no less.The politicians seem to be living in a different world from the rest of the country altogether.If it was their business would they stop spending then ? If was their family budget would they stop spending then ??????????
If it were their family budget they just write rubber checks!
Seriously, why would their public Ethics be any different than their private ones?
I was considering today, we beat up the “Government” for all its incompetency, contradiction, waste and errant largess,
but it is like kicking the chair the leg of which almost tripped you up as you passed by!
Behind this Entity that wastes human productivity, professes to know better than the individual what is good for the individual, mandates we fund their disgraceful behavior, asinine pet projects and handouts, and block the way at every turn are people.
Elected, appointed and rank and file Civil servants.
People who really should be held personally accountable for their errors, thefts, cronyism, Victimization, and all their other well known sins, not just by the public but by the very system itself.
There is a direct correlation between the state our country is in, and the level of Public acceptance of flat out wrong, illegal and foolish pandering and straight out lying.
If they are a reflection of us,
we are a sorry lot!
The pirates were simply given suits, ties, titles and free license.
Think about the idiocy level one must cope with at every turn, never mind the new schemes and rules, taxes and compliance requirements flowing like molasses down from on high, threatening to stick everyone and everything in place.
Ludicrous,
but we accept it, and struggle on, grumbling just enough not to be heard.
I maintain we eat our own far too efficiently, strangle dreams and potential at will, for no damn better reason than we always have done thus.
Pure tripe, and endemic.
Rant over.
Time to face the truth, government has become nothing more than a giant Ponzi Scheme.. The numbers above don’t lie, only our politicians.. We are not alone; just look at the secular decline of the United States and you will see Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” being paved right before you very eyes..
VAT is just another failed scheme, a product of Keynesian stupidity, to hopefully raise more taxes for government and to keep the pyramid scheme going.. Unfortunately, if history is a guide, it only will bring even more failure and poverty to our fragile economy.. It has never worked before as promised and will not work here in the Bahamas and for that matter any where else in the deficit ridden Caribbean..
Time to make the politicians face the truth and change the country’s economic direction before its to late.. There are viable and proved solutions, but leadership and courage will be necessary if we are to cure this death threatening economic epidemic that confronts our little country.. Time to do the right thing before we cross the point of no return and we end up on the junk pile of failing nations.. VERITAS
So true Oracle they don’t seem to have any ethics anyway.
It is not ethics that is the question for ethics is the study of human behavior and is often refined into code of conduct.. The substantive issue is one of morality, integrity and individual conscience.. Organizations like political parties love to boast about their standard of ethics but such protocols, maybe noble in purpose, are seldom the standards that become the conduct of their human behavior.. Could it be that man is fundamentally corrupt by his human nature?? That question has plagued mankind since the advent of human existence.. Guess this is best left to the so-called experts on ethics..