Prime Minister says "We depend on the business sector to create the wealth..." and urges foreign investors to bring "that injection of resources" and that "we (T&T) are open for business." Investors coming to Trinidad and Tobago will be given tax holidays and incentives, as encouragement to make money to repatriate to their home countries. Those incentives would serve the country vastly better if they were utilised locally to pay better salaries to workers, who would spend most of the money at home. Very little of that expenditure would go abroad except to pay for imports, and to be banked in foreign countries by local businessmen.
The government is misguided in its approach to economic matters and will only succeed in putting vast sums of money in the hands of people who already have too much-if there is such a thing as too much money. Meantime the middle class is being decimated, and the working class pauperised, by the idiocy of 5 per cent wage increases. Under no conditions can anyone person believe that 5 per cent salary increase over three years is reasonable. The very people who support such a position, on the spurious grounds that the economy cannot sustain it, can provide no evidence whatever to justify their case. More than that, they would never contemplate increases of that kind for themselves. They would prefer to migrate to greener pastures where they have stashed the money they accumulated in the fat years.
Just let the government propose the same 5 per cent incentive to encourage them to invest and the same people who argue that the economy cannot sustain more than 5 per cent wage increase will bawl. This is the same business sector which brought the economy to its knees and who, the government thinks, will resuscitate it, so long as the government provides the tax incentives. The government must be brought to the realisation that it is the working class that will be the saving of the economy, but not on 5 per cent!
Karan Mahabirsingh
Freeport