By SEAN DOUGLAS Thursday, September 17 2009

ST Augustine MP Vasant Bharath hit the raft of tax-hikes proposed in the Budget as “callous and heartless”, especially for the poor, as he spoke in the Lower House on the orders to impose these increases.

He said the taxes were in order to fund the Government’s continuing squandermania.

“Instead of facing up to their responsibility, the Government decides to tax the population, and continue with their wild spending.”

Bharath said the country is clearly in a recession, according to all the data, but the only one who doesn’t know this is the Finance Minister. He accused the Government of mortgaging the future of the nation’s children, even as he noted the country owes $4 billion in interest payments, in addition to the principal sum incurred as the public debt. “The Minister of Finance doesn’t understand that deficit financing can become part of the hardcore debt of a country.” He accused the Government of repeating the errors of the 1981 PNM government, saying the country is now in the era of “A Dose of Salts, Part Two”.

“After squandering $300 billion, the Government has come to Parliament to extract its pound of flesh from a population that is bruised and battered.”

Bharath said the budget was “faceless and visionless”. It had failed to inject the necessary confidence into the economy, he said. “This Government has once again ‘maxed out’ the country’s credit card, leaving the debt for our children to pay.”

He likened the Government’s performance to that of past PNM governments about whom former Prime Minister ANR Robinson in 1987 complained had “blown it”. At that, Manning rose to hit the NAR Government’s running of the energy sector, which he said the 1991 PNM Government had then needed one year to rectify.

Bharath alluded that things might be even worse now than in the 1980s as he said the 1980s boom had seen the country enjoy a savings-to-revenue ratio of 81 percent —which itself was wiped out in just three years— compared to such a ratio today of just 35 percent. He described the current tax-hikes as “nuisance taxes” and “punitive taxes” which citizens would resent paying in light of the Government’s squandermania. Bharath said an international agency said 200,000 people in this country live on less than $14 per day.

“This is why a population rises up. They are unable to take any more...People are totally fed up with what is taking place.” He said the Government was imposing these tax-hikes after spending $1 billion on the Fifth Summit of the Americas, and while it plans to spend $500 million on the Commonwealth conference. He said people were angry the Government had spent $200 million to hire two cruise-ships for a fortnight for the Fifth Summit, while schoolchildren were now forced to sell toolum and sugar-cake in order to pay their schools’ electricity bills.

He wondered how citizens feel paying more taxes on the little comforts in life such as alcohol and tobacco, while $700 million was spent on the controversial Tarouba Stadium.

Bharath said in his own constituency, work has stopped on Blackman Ravine, while he displayed a photo of a filthy drain at Orange Grove Road. “People see extravagance around them, but they are unable to get a simple thing like a drain cleaned.”

He said this year’s deficit had secretly risen from $1.4 billion to $8 billion. “We’ll keep it from the people, and when the time comes we’ll raise taxes,” he surmised the Government must have said. Bharath said the tax hikes were a revenue-raising measure.

Earlier Finance Minister, Karen Nunez-Tesheira, piloting the orders, said the tax hikes on alcohol and tobacco flowed from the “Caring Society” pillar of the Government’s Vision 2020 plan, and would curb lifestyle diseases, and the harmful effects of alcohol on family life.