As Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert pre­pares to de­liv­er per­haps the Gov­ern­ment’s most chal­leng­ing fis­cal pack­age, Caribbean econ­o­mist Dr Claudius Pre­ville says in­creas­ing tax­es will on­ly lead­ing to a shrink­ing of the econ­o­my.
Pre­ville spoke at the Oropouche East Con­stituen­cy vir­tu­al Pre-Bud­get Con­sul­ta­tion at the Oropouche East Con­stituen­cy Of­fice in Debe. Ex­plain­ing that Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) is a func­tion of con­sump­tion, in­vest­ment, gov­ern­ment spend­ing and Net Trade Flows, he said that with T&T’s debt al­ready high, there is a need to re­duce its re­liance of ex­ter­nal bor­row­ing.
“If con­sump­tion is pos­i­tive, peo­ple are spend­ing mon­ey in the econ­o­my, GDP goes up. If an in­vest­ment is be­ing done, whether it is a for­eign or lo­cal in­vest­ment, GDP goes up. What­ev­er the Gov­ern­ment spends on, the GDP goes up and if the Net Trade Flows are pos­i­tive, mean­ing if ex­ports ex­ceed im­ports, again the GDP goes up.

"In any sit­u­a­tion, gov­ern­ment spend­ing has to be done and al­ways re­sults in a boost­ing of the econ­o­my, and there­fore you will have eco­nom­ic growth in­creas­ing.
“Tax­es, on the oth­er hand, when they are im­posed, what they do is re­duce the de­mand, and they dis­cour­age do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion, so the econ­o­my shrinks. It is a fact whether you are a PNM gov­ern­ment or a UNC gov­ern­ment. You can­not run away from this,” Pre­ville said.

Mooni­lal pre­dicts sav­age at­tack on work­er in bud­get

Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal is pre­dict­ing a “sav­age at­tack on work­ers” in Mon­day’s bud­get, say­ing that Im­bert and Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley al­ready com­mu­ni­cat­ed this in the re­cent­ly held 'Spot­light on the Bud­get' at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel. Mooni­lal sug­gest­ed that from Row­ley’s speech, it ap­pears that TTEC, WASA and port work­ers could be on the chop­ping block. It is in ad­di­tion to in­creas­es in wa­ter rates and elec­tric­i­ty charges.
“There will be great suf­fer­ing for the work­ing poor and greater job­less­ness in the labour mar­ket,” Mooni­lal said.
For­mer ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh called on the Gov­ern­ment to re­form the pub­lic health sec­tor as the Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty mod­el was not work­ing. Gopeesingh said it was a fact that for the past decade, the Gov­ern­ment spent ap­prox­i­mate­ly $6 bil­lion per year on health, yet the sec­tor was in its worst state ever. He rec­om­mend­ed that the Gov­ern­ment al­lo­cate funds to up­grade half of its health cen­tres to serve the pub­lic bet­ter as well as ded­i­cat­ing the var­i­ous hos­pi­tals to spe­cif­ic fields of med­i­cine in­stead of each of­fer­ing the avail­able range. In ed­u­ca­tion, he said the Gov­ern­ment was sav­ing mil­lions by not hav­ing to feed chil­dren at schools and trans­port­ing them. There­fore, that mon­ey can go to­wards pro­vid­ing com­put­ers for chil­dren and ma­te­ri­als for schools. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he said the gov­ern­ment should work with in­ter­net ser­vice providers to in­crease the avail­abil­i­ty of ser­vice around the coun­try so chil­dren can get their ed­u­ca­tion dur­ing the COVID-19 lock­down on schools.