NASSAU – The level of tax taken in by the Bahamas government each year remains “one of the lowest in the world” and simply “cannot cut it” in the long term, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham said yesterday.
Ingrahan defended tax increases being imposed in this year’s budget and warned that more substantial changes would be required in the future.
Ingraham said that the country’s low-tax status remained the case “notwithstanding the increase in taxes” the government was implementing to shore up its revenue this year, such as those on cars, local beer, tourism and domestic retail banks.
He said that the government collected the equivalent of 18 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product in tax, comparing this to the tax collected in St Lucia (29), Trinidad and Tobago (30), Jamaica (30) and Barbados (33).
“That’s notwithstanding all of the islands and services we have to duplicate. You know how easy it is to run a Barbados with a similar population (size), with one island, one set of high schools, one set of primary schools, one set of roads, one set of electricity to generate?” (Tribune)
