PORT-OF-SPAIN – In what can be aptly described as a “people’s budget”, the People’s Partnership Government Wednesday brought relief to hundreds of thousands of distressed depositors of CLICO and the Hindu Credit Union, with a firm plan to give them their money.
Government also sought to pacify disgruntled policemen with a TT$1 000 (BDS$329) increase in their take-home pay (via tax-free duty allowance); assuaged the suffering of 28 000 indigent Public Service retirees by giving them a minimum pension of TT$3 000 (BDS$987) and offered an amnesty for tax penalties and interest for late filing to all delinquent taxpayers, whether it be corporation tax, land and building taxes, value added tax, income tax, business levy or environmental levy.
Finance Minister Winston Dookeran, in the two-and-a-half-hour-long presentation of his TT$49 billion (BDS$14.9 billion) budget, also announced the expansion of the GATE programme to include vocational training, a milk programme (outside of that already provided in the schools) in which people who cannot afford it would get milk in the health centres and at child welfare clinics and centres for antenatal mothers.
In addition to the pension increases, the aged would have the benefit of an Elderly Mobile Shuttle Service in 2011. First-time homeowners will receive a tax credit of TT$18 000 (BDS$6 000) per household on mortgage interest paid for five years, with effect from the date of acquisition.
To hard-pressed contractors who have been owed TT$4 billion (BDS$1.22 billion) by the government, Dookeran gave the assurance that government had already started putting measures in place to meet those commitments.
True to its word, the government gave the people what they wanted and “axed the property tax”, carrying the country’s happy homeowners back to last year’s levels of land and building taxes. “Old rates and old (property) values,” Dookeran declared to thunderous table-thumping. (Trinidad Express)
