In de­liv­er­ing the 2024 Bud­get yes­ter­day, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert was re­quired to strike a bal­ance be­tween the eco­nom­ic need to main­tain some mea­sure of fis­cal dis­ci­pline and the so­cio-po­lit­i­cal de­mand to show em­pa­thy to those most in need.

To a large ex­tent, he got the bal­ance right.

The ini­tial es­ti­mate of the fis­cal deficit in the cur­rent 2024 fis­cal year is 2.7 per cent of GDP or $5.197 bil­lion, based on to­tal ex­pen­di­ture of $59.20 bil­lion and to­tal rev­enue of $54.012 bil­lion.

Based on the pro­ject­ed ex­pen­di­ture of $59.20 bil­lion, Mr Im­bert has sat­is­fied those at the low­est end of T&T’s in­come pyra­mid by in­creas­ing the min­i­mum wage by $3 an hour to $20.50, to take ef­fect from Jan­u­ary.

That mea­sure, Mr Im­bert said, should im­prove the stan­dard of liv­ing of about 190,000 work­ers, in­clud­ing thou­sands em­ployed by the Gov­ern­ment. Mr Im­bert not­ed the hike would in­crease Gov­ern­ment’s ex­pen­di­ture for work­ers at the min­i­mum wage by at least $50 mil­lion per year.

The Bud­get al­so in­clud­ed an al­lo­ca­tion of $1 bil­lion in back­pay for the 37,000 em­ploy­ees of trade unions who ac­cept­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s four per cent wage in­crease for 2014-2019. That wage set­tle­ment will add $360 mil­lion to the Gov­ern­ment’s wage bill. Quite help­ful­ly, Mr Im­bert said he would press to en­sure the pay­ment of ar­rears be­fore Christ­mas.

As a ges­ture of good­will, the min­is­ter al­so said he would seek Par­lia­ment’s ap­proval to make tax-free the one-time lump sum pay­ment of $4,000 for the 1,600 month­ly paid and 100 hourly, dai­ly and week­ly-rat­ed work­ers who re­tired be­tween Jan­u­ary 1, 2014 and Sep­tem­ber 30, 2016. That mea­sure is es­ti­mat­ed to cost Gov­ern­ment $19.7 mil­lion in rev­enue fore­gone.

The Gov­ern­ment al­so in­clud­ed a $1,000 school sup­plies and book grant to 65,000 needy stu­dents, which will cost $65 mil­lion in 2024.

These four mea­sures out­lined in the Bud­get could po­ten­tial­ly pos­i­tive­ly im­pact the lives of an es­ti­mat­ed 293,700 peo­ple across the coun­try at a cost of $1.49 bil­lion. And many of those re­cip­i­ents of the min­i­mum wage in­crease will al­so be among re­cip­i­ents of the $1,000 book grant.

On the oth­er hand, Mr Im­bert made it clear that the Gov­ern­ment in­tend­ed to start col­lect­ing the prop­er­ty tax in the 2024 fi­nan­cial year, which be­gan on Sun­day.

He al­so went out of his way to fore­cast that in its new busi­ness mod­el, WASA was ex­pect­ed to re­duce its de­pen­dence on gov­ern­ment sub­ven­tions which, in the 2019-2023 pe­ri­od, amount­ed to $8.118 bil­lion.

“We ex­pect the net deficit of WASA to be sub­stan­tial­ly nar­rowed fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of the WASA price re­view by the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC),” Mr Im­bert not­ed.

The Min­is­ter of Fi­nance al­so re­vealed that the Gov­ern­ment was pay­ing dear­ly to sub­sidise the con­sump­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly eight per cent of the to­tal nat­ur­al gas pro­duced in the coun­try to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty.

In ad­di­tion to that sub­sidy, he not­ed, the Gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ed 121,000 low-in­come house­holds with a re­bate of 35 per cent on their elec­tric­i­ty bills at a cost of $268 mil­lion be­tween 2019 and 2023 fis­cal years.

While Mr Im­bert did not ex­plic­it­ly say elec­tric­i­ty rates would in­crease, T&TEC, like WASA, has a rate in­crease ap­pli­ca­tion be­fore the RIC.

While tens of thou­sands of cit­i­zens will no doubt ben­e­fit from the 2024 Bud­get, Mr Im­bert seems to be sig­nalling that even more cit­i­zens will be re­quired to dig deeply in­to their pock­ets in this fis­cal year.