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2012
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April
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- “Hilton Cliff Music Award for 2012”
- Dreams
- Dreams
- Ave Maria Mother’s Day pageant
- Ally Kyatt: King of St. Lucian Dancehall
- The St. Lucia Association Of Professional Photogra...
- The Saint Lucia Coalition Of Services Industries C...
- The global economy grew substantially in the first...
- The analyst, a new business magazine
- SOL in St. Lucia celebrates service excellence
- First Citizens Market Watch
- ECFH Financially Speaking
- Daily Markets Wrap Up – Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
- Capita Financial Contributes to Credit Union Youth
- Talk free plus get cash back only with Digicel!
- Sandals Resorts named champion of the environment
- Mall Entertainment
- LIME Live NBA
- LIME Colleague Helps Children Develop a Love for R...
- Digicel Invites Customers to help Raise $200,000 f...
- Digicel gears up for a bigger better launch of the...
- Caribbean Metals Brings Sunshine To Laborie!
- Writer from South releases new book
- Why are we studying CNCDS in Saint Lucia now
- What a Wick: the last 7 days in 15 (21st to 27th A...
- Value Added Tax (VAT) and the Consumer – Part4
- Top tips for a lease agreement
- The VAT Readiness Checklist
- The Inception of Value added Tax (VAT) in Nation S...
- The 29th Annual National Convention of the Baha’is...
- Talking Sustainable Development from the United Na...
- St. Lucian Spirit for Carnival 2012
- Soufriere Creole Jazz celebrates five years
- PROSAF - Surviving sexual abuse
- Meet David Maître, Deputy Chief of Port Police – N...
- Intellectual Property and You (Protecting your Int...
- How to teach children about staying healthy
- Fit4Life – The New Year Revolution cont’d
- Dr. Didacus Jules to Deliver Key Note Address at O...
- VSADC Youth Academy Switches Training Venue
- Teams Prepare For Blackheart 2012
- Intriguing Cricket Action for ‘Jesus T20’ On Sunday
- FIVB World Championship at the BIPF
- Double Division Netball Final
- Darren Sammy Retained As Captain
- Bronze medal for Makeba....
- Did You Get it?
- Trinidad and the CCJ –Still loitering
- THAT VALUE ADDED TAX… a personal experience
- Fear and desperation reactivate socialism
- A call for self reliance!.......
- In recognition of Labour Day Address by Minister f...
- No ‘Action’ in Mas
- $1.457 BILLION BUDGET
- ST. LUCIA EMPLOYERS’ FEDERATION Hosts Training for...
- Daily Markets Wrap Up – Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
- Krystal Nestor - Musician, arranger
- The Chairman’s Reserve Country Train Moves to Souf...
- Sandals Annual Reunion Week lures hundreds of Gues...
- LIME and the BTC Strengthen Partnership
- Heineken Spreads its Love for Saint Lucia Jazz All...
- Minister’s Update on Black Sigatoka
- LucianAid Foundation hosts National Food Drive
- Literary Night Honours Kendel
- Jazz in the South returns to Vieux Fort Square
- 1st National Bank St. Lucia Limited and UWI Open C...
- Victory for Gros Islet in Masters Cricket
- ST. LUCIA GOLF OPEN
- SLRFU Names Squads To Play Curacao
- Mabouya Valley For Jesus T20 Bowls Off This Sunday
- The Training Wing of the St. Lucia cadet Corps
- St Lucians Say,”No VAT In September”
- NWU Letter re : poll interference
- World Intellectual Property Day April 26, 2012
- THRONE SPEECH
- Hotel Chocolat Features On This Year’s Condé Nast ...
- IMF Projects Economic Growth in Caribbean for 2012...
- Daily Markets Wrap Up – Monday, April 23rd, 2012
- 2 Grammys & a new hit record top up Melanie Fiona’...
- LIME - Bringing the Party to the People
- Heineken Launches Saint Lucia Jazz 2012 Promotions
- New Glaucoma Research Proposes New Glaucoma Therapy
- Monroe College Rolls out NEW Media Diploma Programme
- The Vital Role of School Sports
- GOOD RUN FOR MURRAY
- 2012 Guinness Street Football Final 16
- Yatar Tournaments in Commemoration
- Today’s Youth, Tomorrow’s Promise
- Soufriere Foundation Announces Appointment of CEO
- La Woz Sub Committee
- Fishin’ well done!
- Do Batsmen Fail Or Do We Fail Our Batsmen?
- Are we living in fear or not?
- A Black US President? Never!
- VBCC Going On Fifty
- World Earth Day 2012
- New Look for Fond D’Or
- NATIONAL YOUTH AWARDS
- LPM Deputy-Leader Resigns
- Caribbean One-Minute Mobile Film Festival
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April
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15 comments:
The issue we do not want to face is that we have a horrendeously expensive civil service that does NOT give value for money.
Yet that is the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss.
Kenny Anthony and Phillip Pierre are tax and spend liberals who more than anyone caused the civil service to reach such an alarming size costing over $400 million annually.
The civil service should be cut by at least 15% yet Kenny and Phillip are adding more and more persons to the payroll.
They are both using dubious economics to say that by the government taxing, borrowing and spending like drunken sailors that they are "prime pumping" the economy. That is a lie as 70% of money spent in St. Lucia goes overseas almost immediately and does not have much of a multiplier effect.
All they are doing as I said they would is putting more taxes and borrowing on the backs of the middle class so they can give more jobs to Labour party supporters.
All the money this government borrows just goes to the pocket of the upper class St. Lucian shopkeepers which is what most of our businessmen are. They get their profits on the goods people buy before the money goes overseas.
The rest goes to Labour contractors so they can pump money back to the Labour Party coffers.
St.Lucians are feeling the hell and it will just continue with VAT.
St. Lucia is reporting good igures for tourism for this Winter 2011/12.
As we all know, but the Labour Party will not admit, is that this was because of efforts by Allan Chastanet as Tourism Minister. Most people made their decisions to go to St. Lucia from the middle of last year.
Wait until we see the dismal figures for Summer 2012 and Winter 2012/13 to see how that complete novice Lorne is going to lead tourism down the drain.
Well done Allan Chastanet !
You are such a hypocrite Josie. King said that he would implement VAT even in the presence of widespread poverty among St.Lucians. What did you say then when you made that pronouncement? You remained mute, you said nada, zip. So shut up you are all political hypocrites! Zot toute i nayai.
Josie and all others who are now shouting down the introduction of VAT remained mute when King and his bunch of greedy,self-aggrandizing,money grabbers were going to slap it on us in April.
Thank God we now have a more mature and discerning electorate who can detect insincerity when they see it.
Jason Sifflet's commentary on VAT in the Star newspaper is the best response to the foolishness that comes from people like Josie.
Listening to the above two SLP apologists reminds us of why the Caribbean is on such a downward trend. They do not comprehend anything but the backward primitive standards that the SLP have put in place whenever they were in power.
If all these fooled persons cannot distinguish right from wrong or what standards are required to get us to the next level then you understand why we are always go backward.
Lorne is a disaster, tourism is in a tailspin, VAT is coming.
Soon nobody will be able to afford groceries at Julians.
Enjoy the Drag Wars Lorne, you should be attracting tourists.
Waste of time amateur.
Choops.
why don't all you uwp hacks go and make a round with the foolishness you all keep writing each and every time. Josie papa failure.
Good article by Rick Wayne in the Star on the Budget debate.
My comments:
Rick does a proper psychoanalysis of our people when he writes these article noting for example the following:
“..overly proud Afro-Caribbean people ..”,
“..we refuse to recognize the difference between reality and BS!”
We see this every day in St. Lucia – an overt arrogance not matched by our behavior or performance as a community.
We strut haughtily , are quick to get belligerent even when wrong and caught practicing our indecent behavior. It permeates our entire society and even our so called “elite” are as callow producing children as shallow as liberal America.
It expresses itself in our so called Budget Debate which is not about budgeting neither debating. Equally oblivious characters on both side of the House hurl words around the room and in the end they simply borrow, tax and spend like drunken sailors. No standards, no transparency and no accountability.
Vat is a tax on the poor. We need to look at the greedy people who get rich but are not registered for tax, there are many on the island. We need to find a system that makes these people contribute to the tax requirements. I am sorry to say many vendors who charge the tourists unbelievably high prices for shoddy goods and fruit that is often acquired by theft, are some of these people; who monitors their profits? The only people who appear to pay a lot of tax are the less well off who pay tax directly from their wages.People earning good salaries should pay, the high earners should help the poor. The civil service is a joke, in my experience the only computer work they do is play 'solo', then refuse to find out if you ask a question, lazy shiftless individuals! Shed loads of money could be clawed back by making goverment organisations more efficient.
For those always talking about how tourism money goes abroad and the multi-year tax breaks that hotel companies get in St. Lucia. I want to draw your attention to the fact that tourism is one of the highest spending and earning sectors of the economy which is not propoperly captured by the current taxation system. Tourism puts high stress on and consumes alot of public services without returning enough tax to gov't to invest in thoses services. VAT, while it will realistically not capture all of what we may want, it WILL result in the industry paying a fairer share of tax. Well that's if they don't try to move all their sales activities offshore. There will be the same effect for other under-contributing sectors of the economy.
VAT revenues are usually used to fund social programmes for more marginalised groups. It can also fund the development and expansion of other sectors of the econommy to provide jobs as well as increase the tax base. Guess what people, we are not a massive metropolitant country with huge FDI inflows so government needs to act as an investor alot of the time in order to expand the economy. And some times it is necessary to tax to fund this investment.
If st. Lucian business just want to sit on their capital and not invest or do not have bright enough ideas to get into public/private investment ventures or other structured investment that will move the economy government will have to tax to fund commercial, social and other kinds of investment.
I really hate when people don't think hings clearly and just keep spout PR catch phrases such as "tax and spend liberals" that they imbibe fro American TV. Take off the political glasses and put on some economic and analytical ones.
What analytical?
You string together a few big words (or at least those you think are big)in an abstract, incompetent manner to excuse the SLP's tax and spend tactics and call that analysis.
Just one example:
you wrote:
"VAT revenues are usually used to fund social programmes for more marginalised groups."
A clearly disingeneous statement and the fraud is so apparent that you even had to CYA by using the term"usually".
VAT in the Caribbean is used to cover the incompetence of our liberal politicians and not"used to fund social programmes". If you waste 30% of your budget on paying party hacks, expanding the size of an inefficient givernment and paying interest on debt you have inefficiently piled up on the people - where does the "social programmes" come in ? Yuor PM has travelled at least 8 times in the past 5 months. What benefit has that brought to St. Lucia except for him renewing his credentials with his regional counterparts to show "I am back" ?
The social programmes as we have seen in St. Lucia usually fail because the SLP just use the taxes and borrowing to buy votes. Aside from the obvious social programmes(some of which I would expand) to deal with certain obvious social ills the rest of it is pure government bobol.
Do you know that interest on debt has now risen to $225 million annually in this SLP budget from the $16 million when the SLP first came into power in 1997 ?
In other words $4 million per week in interest payments mostly compliments of Kenny Davis Anthony - your savior.
Until people see goverment as the servants of the people, and not bait to incense opposition supporters, nothing here will change. The parties should be working together, transparently for the good of the people, no party has the monopoly in a democracy. I can't believe that a small island like this doesn't wake up and see the damage that the rhetoric causes. What has been achieved in the last thirty years, people ar emore stupid and ignorant, is that somehting to be proud of.
Again this thing of all parties coming together is more of the liberal pappyshow talk.
How can you come together with liberals like Kenny and the SLP who ohly know how to tax, borrow and spend ?
You would have to compromise ALL your first principles and go against fundamental Judeo Christian principles to work with the SLP.
If you intended to run a good government you would have to compromise so many economic and social values to work with Phillip and Kenny therefore everything would collapse as it will under Labour.
The only way you can work with those jokers is if you have no principles to begin with.
The present budget for example is full of so much lies, double talk and impossible to verify nonsense including more debt, endless interest payments, an expanded useless public service and promises that will never be fulfilled as in previous years that you can see the blueprint for disaster if you were to "compromise you principles" to work with a SLP government.
Bitter days are here till 2016 !
Dear Mr./Ms American catch-phrase. I used no big words. I simply explained the economic possibiities of VAT. You cannot understand basic Macroeconomic policy so you resort to insults.
I have no political agenda I am not a member of any of the parties that you are talking about. I am concerned about the development of my country.
I was supportive of the VAT when it was mooted in the first Anthony administration. I was for it under the King administration and I am still for it now. In fact I thought they should have bit the bullet and introduce it during a period of prosperity and high spending and consumption. However apparently our legislators were too slow. VAT WILL fund social investment and spending. It is up to us as citizens to participate in the process of governance and make sure that these investments are effective and lay the ground for economic growth and job creation. We have to keep gov't on their toes on implementation.
You continue to talk about SLP and divisiveness. In my previous post I never mentioned or adressed any politics, only economic policy. You are the one who is divisive. You sound a bit manic.
Anonymous at May 1, 2012 11:19 PM, what do you expect from fellas like Hepburn? Where it comes to his SLP hatred, Hepburn is absolutely "manic", panic, lunatic, sick, and freak! It's just the nature of the BEAST inside of him.
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