BLP legacy: reduction of corporate tax from 40 to 25 per cent enabling businesses to reinvest more profits and create a significant number of the 30 000-plus jobs created by the Arthur Administration; and reduced from 25 to 15 per cent corporation tax for small businesses, those in special development areas, manufacturing and constructing houses selling for less than $150 000, thereby generating even more jobs.
For the past several months, leading spokespersons for the Central Bank and the Government never missed an opportunity to drill into the heads of financially struggling Barbadians desperately looking for hope, that there was stability in the national economy, with “stability” being defined as “the state of being stable, steady or unchanging”.
This persistent implication of hope of economic improvement being seemingly around the corner was most recently hammered home by Finance Minister Chris Sinckler in the 2012 Budget with his several references to “stable” and “stability” as he struggled to paint a state of the economy that was far more glowing than individuals and businesses were experiencing in the reality of their lives.
Not even the consistent and systematic deconstruction of the Democratic Labour Party’s (DLP) economic management, in general, and the 2012 Budget, in particular, by highly respected economist and former Finance Minister Owen Arthur along with Miss Mia Mottley, Clyde Mascoll and others in the BLP could get the Central Bank and the Dems to stop dangling false hope before Barbadians by stridently claiming that DLP policies had returned “stability” to the economy.
Now, in ways highly reminiscent of the eventual hasty abandonment of the once much celebrated Central Bank and DLP economic “spurt”, the term “stability” in relation to the overall economy seems to have suffered the same death. That is, if the public are to judge from the bank’s official Press Release June 2012, issued on July 9 reviewing the economy’s performance for the first six months of 2012.
For nowhere in the 14-page document is there a single reference to the “stability” of the economy as a whole. Instead, amidst the abundance of jargon that conceals the real truth from the average Barbadian, the statement admits that “it will be some time before robust growth takes root”, stressing that our “economic difficulties are by no means over, and our growth, employment and inflation indicators remain less than satisfactory”.
Such Central Bank revelations cruelly dashed any hope for a brighter future that might have lingered after the emptiness of Sinckler’s Budget. For not only is the Central Bank no longer reassuring us of economic “stability”, but claims that expected growth would be based on “private investment in the foreign exchange sectors”, a promise that for nearly five years has failed to bear major fruit.
When the disclosed $63 million foreign exchange leakage is added to the disturbing DLP raids on NIS funds, CLICO, rising unemployment and prices, snatched away tax free allowances, high energy prices and climbing poverty levels, the public has overwhelmingly concluded that the DLP’s economic and social policies have failed miserably and they are anxious to turn things around by changing the Government for the BLP.
• Beresford Leon Padmore is a psuedonym for the Barbados Labour Party.
