Prime Minister Freundel Stuart said while Opposition Leader Owen Arthur had given a disquisition on the economy, he personally did not hear him say there was anything fundamentally wrong with the 2011?– 2012 Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure.
Stuart was speaking on the third day of debate in the Lower Chamber where he insisted that there has been no serious criticism of the Estimates.
He said that the crux of Arthur’s discourse actually hinged on an old debate that had divided the Barbados Labour Party and led to the formation of the Democratic Labour Party – and this was the question of running a deficit budget as opposed to a balanced one.
Basically, he said, BLP leader Grantley Adams felt Government should not spend more than it earned while Errol Barrow and (Sir James) Cameron Tudor, fresh out of the London School of Economics and Oxford University respectively, argued that effective meaningful economic advancement could not be achieved by a “housewife’s budget” but by a deficit budget.
Stuart said this was how Barbados had been able to transform itself from a village to a nation; and since it had worked over the years, the DLP would remain “unrepentant devotees of Keynesian economic thought”. (RJ)
