“Christie: It’s easy to piss away money” – The Tribune

Excerpt from this story; “WHILE speaking at the renaming ceremony of a portion of Thompson Boulevard to University Drive, Prime Minister Perry Christie urged University of The Bahamas executives and students to ensure they have leaders who are knowledgeable and ‘accountable’ for the state of the economy, insisting that; it is so important to recognize how easy it is to piss away money’.

Do we have a confession here?

Indeed, Mr. Prime Minister, it is easy to ‘piss away money’, as your administration has proven time and time again’, with the main issue being the manner in which you detailed the accounting how over a billion dollars in value-added tax revenue collected since its implementation has been used; in light of the realities of our current economic position, that being our credit rating being at ‘junk status’.

Most Bahamians are getting over the insulting explanation by the prime minister and sometimes minister of finance on the accounting of the revenue collected from VAT:

• 40 percent went to reducing the deficit
• 30 percent went to general expenditures while,
• 30 percent went to replace revenue ‘lost’ from tax reductions

With the numbers presented; approximately $56 million has been allocated to reducing the defect but yet the deficit has continued to grow; unabated and with no explanation.

No reasonable person expected value-added tax to be the ‘magic spell’ and take away all of our national debt while lowering the county’s deficit over night, nut when one opens the dailies or turns on the news and hears and sees that the debt had incurred another billion dollars and the deficit has risen at an alarming rate, despite the recent tax reform exercise; one would be irresponsible not to question the government as to what is really going on.

So, I am left to buy the Prime Ministers unsolicited explanation as to what has happened to the money collected from VAT; it has been poorly managed and basically ‘pissed away’.

One positive piece of advice that Prime Minister Perry Christie passed on to the young people in attendance was to “ensure they have leaders who are knowledgeable and ‘accountable’; basically advising they not to vote for him and his Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) organization.

The Progressive Liberal Party fails for one reason, it is their nature.

END