Ex­pect more hard­ship.

This was the grim pre­dic­tion for the 2023 Bud­get sug­gest­ed by the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) on the eve of Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert’s pre­sen­ta­tion to­day.

Speak­ing at the Op­po­si­tion’s Sun­day Me­dia Brief­ing yes­ter­day, Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal and Ma­yaro MP Rush­ton Paray proph­e­sied a bleak eco­nom­ic out­look for T&T, based on their analy­sis of Im­bert’s sev­en pre­vi­ous deficit bud­gets and the cur­rent state of the econ­o­my.

Both Mooni­lal and Paray sug­gest­ed that an in­crease in fu­el prices is in­evitable, con­sid­er­ing Im­bert’s state­ments re­gard­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s con­sid­er­a­tion of a $1 bil­lion cap on the coun­try’s fu­el sub­sidy dur­ing a Spot­light on the Econ­o­my event ear­li­er this month.

“I am telling the coun­try to­day from where I am sit­ting it ap­pears we are in for a rough road ahead. I am telling the peo­ple of T&T to ex­pect more hard­ship. Ex­pect more hard­ship,” Mooni­lal said.

Mooni­lal not­ed that while the Gov­ern­ment has grad­u­al­ly re­duced the fu­el sub­sidy since 2016, it has done very lit­tle to im­prove pub­lic trans­port and the coun­try’s road net­work, which he de­scribed as not “car wor­thy.”

“We are go­ing to move from COVID to chaos when the prices go up for trans­porta­tion,” Mooni­lal said.

Paray sug­gest­ed that Im­bert may seek to again blame the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic for the cur­rent state of the econ­o­my.

He said the pan­dem­ic should no longer be an ex­cuse as many coun­tries, in­clud­ing re­gion­al neigh­bours, were well ahead in their eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery ef­forts.

“Facts are stub­born things and the fact is Im­bert and the Row­ley-led PNM Gov­ern­ment crashed this econ­o­my way be­fore COVID,” Paray said.

He al­so stat­ed that he ex­pect­ed an in­crease in tax­es but claimed that such would be fu­tile in seek­ing to im­prove the econ­o­my.

“You can­not tax the na­tion in­to pros­per­i­ty. Every econ­o­mist knows this,” he said.

Deal­ing with the peren­ni­al is­sue of forex short­ages, Paray stat­ed that it con­tin­ues to crip­ple small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es, which are forced to turn to the “black mar­ket” to source for­eign ex­change to pay for goods.

“Is our T&T dol­lar over­val­ued? Is the black-mar­ket price the cor­rect price?” Paray asked.

He sug­gest­ed that the on­ly so­lu­tion is to in­crease ex­ports or con­sid­er de­valu­ing the cur­ren­cy.

Say­ing that job­less­ness con­tin­ues to be a ma­jor is­sue, Paray said the of­fi­cial un­em­ploy­ment rate may not be ac­cu­rate, since small busi­ness­es are not re­quired to re­port re­trench­ments if they in­volve less than five em­ploy­ees.

How­ev­er, Mooni­lal sug­gest­ed that Im­bert may not ad­dress job cre­ation in his pre­sen­ta­tion.

“I don’t think he would speak to cre­at­ing jobs. In fact, I think he may speak about tak­ing away jobs and clos­ing down in­dus­tries as they did with the scrap iron in­dus­try,” Mooni­lal said.

Paray said he is un­con­vinced that Im­bert has the com­pe­tence, skill, or ideas to help solve the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic is­sues, as his pre­vi­ous bud­gets show.

“The Min­is­ter of Fi­nance will no doubt pro­duce a bud­get that would con­tin­ue to short-change the peo­ple of the na­tion,” Paray said.