Dawn Ritch, Contributor
FOR THE good of the country, the interminably Patterson-led administration must come to an end as soon as possible. There must be no delay.
Outside of athletics, the only records being broken in Jamaica are those for official corruption, waste, and public suffering on a magnitude incomprehensible to any well-thinking person.
The majority have been stunned into silence as they desperately try to make ends meet. All those ends seem to have a life of their own. There is no limit to how high they can climb.
Consumption tax has gone up and it was never small to begin with. Then light in a country where it already costs a fortune. Bus fares, fuel of every description, everything has gone up sky high!
NO COMPANY LOSSES
On top of that, this administration proposes to enact legislation to extinguish company losses for tax purposes after five years.
I know they think they're the Almighty, but not even they can set the limit beyond which Jamaican companies can make no more losses. Only bankruptcy can accomplish that.
It is perfectly true that this Government has driven whole sectors into bankruptcy. But some companies held on by the skin of their teeth, inevitably through the personal savings of the owners, and some have lived to see the day.
Many are still not making any profit to speak of, but at least they've stopped putting money in. Some have, some have not. Those still hoping to survive.
Corporate taxes are no longer pleasing Mr. Patterson and his Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies. After five years therefore, no company losses will be considered. The Government proposes to tax losses instead.
This is utter highway robbery in the broad day light. It goes against every corporate tenet known to man, but not to the Patterson highway men begging gas from Venezuela.
Mr. Patterson says that local companies must turn a profit in five years or else, because he's in charge of the guillotine. No prime minister or finance minister should be so bloodless and cold to the productive sector over which it presides.
If a company owner wants to try for eight years, 10 years or even longer than that, then it should be more power to him or her. Not the preordained guillotine of a Government. Only the rules of the market-place and God Almighty should apply.
So I hope Patterson and his Finance Minister demit office without delay. Only a very few Jamaicans will regret their departure. Nobody would want to write their legacy. It is best forgotten and their deeds unravelled, all of them.
It is immoral to penalise the tax payer for the Government's continued mistakes. The Patterson administration has wrecked the Jamaican private sector. It is still unable to provide jobs or expand employment.
As though in spite or malice or revenge, the Government's own policies rob the pockets, pensions and savings of the poor to build highways, parks, and upscale gated communities for the local middle class and wealthy foreigners. And all this, while stand-pipes in rural communities are disconnected for want of public payment. How many houses for the poor has this administration built?
They already collect an education tax out of the pay of Jamaicans employed by the private sector. The public sector can't be bothered to pay it over more often that not.
Then, they turn around and rob the National Housing Trust of $5 billion in order to build and repair schools. Dr. Davies and his boss the Prime Minister are totally shameless.
OUTRAGEOUS INVITATION
I was horrified the other night to see the head of the National Insurance Fund, the national repository of the pension funds of all employed people, cocking his eye at the television camera and inviting members of the public to come in with business proposals and borrow the money. They will even help you write the business plans they said.
This is quite outrageous. The nation's pension fund for the poor is not to become some kind of white rum fountain for middle class entrepreneurs.
Yet this is the same Government that penalises established business people using their personal savings to keep their companies alive, and then they use the nation's hard-earned tax dollars to provide a never-ending bacchanalia for themselves, their friends, families and fools.
Mr. Patterson and Dr. Davies are therefore understandably and hugely popular with local companies in money management, and overseas investment bankers looking forward to more professional fees.
They are also very popular with Mirant Corporation, because of the sweet deal that foreign company got when it purchased our local JPS. The deal has pulled the parent company in the United States out of bankruptcy.
The Jamaican people who suffer under the lash of its electricity rates, are, therefore, entitled to know all the details of this agreement. JPS enjoys not only a fuel adjustment, and a foreign exchange adjustment, but now a 'Z' factor factored into every bill to consumers. And none of that is the kilowatt usage which they also bill for monthly as well.
This array of profit guarantees has been given to a monopoly, 80 per cent owned by a foreign corporation by a Prime Minister who claimed to put the Jamaican people first. Maybe he wasn't referring to us at all, and meant some other people.
AIDING MIRANT
Electricity is a basic necessity. It is an essential service, it is not a luxury, but the Patterson administration has made it rival the cost of school fees, the same ones his Government claimed to be sharing with the hard-pressed tax payers of this country.
This is abuse of a captive market. JPS is a fit symbol of the robber barons the Patterson administration wilfully set upon the backs of the poor.
Mirant has turned the financial corner through an agreement with the people of Jamaica, struck in their name by Mr. Patterson. Like Heather Robinson who now writes for this newspaper, the Prime Minister believes that the People's National Party comes before the country. Loyalty to party above all else will be the death of us.
I just hope that Mirant isn't enjoying consultancies like the Government. Otherwise essential services will one day only be provided for them. No civilised country can afford that.
