Rapheal John-Lall

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says T&T has to cut costs to be able to live on the lim­it­ed re­sources in the coun­try.

"The con­ver­sa­tion of the coun­try has to be what ac­tion we will take to ad­dress the chal­lenges. We have to cut to suit what we have," he said.

Row­ley spoke on Wednes­day night at the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce's first quar­ter­ly busi­ness din­ner at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain.

He spoke about the sharp fall in the rev­enue of the coun­try over the last eight years be­cause of the col­lapse of en­er­gy prices.

Crude oil peaked at US $145 in Ju­ly 2008, while in Jan­u­ary 2016 it is hov­er­ing around US $30 a bar­rel.

He said 2008 was the year of T&T's largest earn­ings and now for fis­cal year 2015 to 2016 the coun­try has a bud­get of $63 bil­lion.

To solve the gap be­tween the coun­try's needs and falling oil prices, the Gov­ern­ment has to in­crease its tax col­lec­tion po­ten­tial to gen­er­ate more rev­enue.

"This Gov­ern­ment will move with alacrity to set up the Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty of T&T and this will im­prove the col­lec­tion of tax­es," he said.

He called the Prop­er­ty Tax "rea­son­able" and said it was need­ed to help raise ex­tra rev­enue.

"This tax should bring in $300 mil­lion. We are com­mit­ted to meet the ex­pen­di­ture of $62 bil­lion. We are al­so im­prov­ing the Gov­ern­ment's abil­i­ty to pros­e­cute tax eva­sion," he said.

Apart from the econ­o­my, he al­so spoke about oth­er chal­lenges the coun­try faced and said fight­ing crime re­mained the "num­ber one" pri­or­i­ty of the coun­try.

"It is un­ac­cept­able that in T&T there are per­sons with firearms and there are three to four mur­ders a day. Pri­or­i­ty num­ber one is the coun­try's safe­ty," he said.

The sec­ond pri­or­i­ty of his Gov­ern­ment was health and the third pri­or­i­ty was ed­u­ca­tion, he added.

He al­so promised the Gov­ern­ment would spend less State re­sources on sub­si­dis­ing as­pects of Car­ni­val that the pri­vate sec­tor could run.

"Less and less of pub­lic monies will be spent fi­nanc­ing the com­mer­cial as­pects of Car­ni­val," he said.

He al­so said mon­ey laun­der­ing could po­ten­tial­ly un­der­mine the econ­o­my in the fu­ture and his Gov­ern­ment would take mea­sures to reg­u­late the gam­ing in­dus­try.

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so de­fend­ed the Gov­ern­ment's move this week to re­move VAT on ba­sic food items, like milk, peanut but­ter and cer­tain cat­e­gories of flour and rice.

He made it clear that VAT was re­moved on cer­tain cat­e­gories of food like rice and flour and not all types as some peo­ple were claim­ing.

He joked that salt caus­es high blood pres­sure yet there were peo­ple com­plain­ing about VAT re­moval on that food prod­uct.

This week Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert an­nounced that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 99 food items were re­moved from the Val­ue Added Tax (VAT) ze­ro-rat­ed list and are back on the list of VAT items.

Row­ley al­so said that cit­i­zens of the coun­try must ad­just some of their taste to con­sume more lo­cal foods that would re­sult in less for­eign ex­ports.