‘It’s all about love’
Prime Minister Patrick Manning yesterday delivered a “love budget” in which he gave big hugs to all pensioners, the ill, disabled and the poor. And he blew kisses to the delinquent taxpayer and the prudent saver as well as the returning national.
The $$ flow freely
…for pensioners, Cepep, URP workers, minimum wage earners
Increases in old age, National Insurance and Government pensions, wage hikes with backpay for Community-based Environment Protection and Enhancement Programme (Cepep) and Unemployment Relief Programme workers, plus a proposed Minimum Wage of $10 were presented to the public yesterday in Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s final budget of his term…
Continue reading ‘An election budget’
Comment: Kids say the darnest things!
The Sugar Cane Industry is now proving to be economically viable. But Government will not help the farmers (The Sugar Cane Co-operative) in their current proposals/ collaboration with a French Company because it will show PNM’s foolishness, lack of foresight and politically motivated spite. 
One expected something new and refreshing when Winston Dookeran entered the political area and announced that “new politics” were the order of the day. In his attempt to offer an alternative to the PNM and UNC one felt that there would have been a stricter adherence to decency and truth and that he would have tried to lift the political discourse to a “higher” level. But, as the French says, the more things change, the more they remain the same; the newer the politics, the more repulsive is its contents.
Last week, India and Pakistan marked their 60th anniversary of independence from Britain. Here in Trinidad and Tobago, where more than half the population has roots in the sub-continent that is now divided into three countries (Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, is often forgotten), the occasion went almost unnoticed. India’s High Commissioner held his usual reception, but nobody else seemed interested in this landmark occasion. Curiously, I found myself intrigued by it-not only because of India’s emergence as a potential global power centre, but more so by its history, by what happened during those tumultuous days preceding and following India’s independence.
With the spectre of a relatively early end to Trinidad and Tobago’s natural gas reserves haunting the country following on the publication of a report which declared that gas reserves in TT would last for a mere 12 years, Government should lobby for the forming of a natural gas equivalent of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) with the immediate accent on an optimum price or system of taxation for the fast depleting asset.
The government’s intention to develop Laventille though politically tactical is also vitally necessary if the social ills of this area are to be alleviated. Not only does this make economic sense but strategic investments in troubled communities are a sure way to address the social evils which has historically plagued communities where poverty rules supreme. Progressive social thinkers supported by statistics, shows that crime thrives where hope is stifled. Survival has always been the law of the jungle whether literally or metaphorically speaking.