Ramotar can’t handle this worsening cost of living issue

Jul 26, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
I wrote that Donald Ramotar would be a disaster for the economy and for Guyanese struggling with the escalating cost of living in Guyana. Mr. Hydar Ally responded (“Wages and salaries have increased significantly over the years since 1992”, SN, July 23, 2011). Real wages are wages after inflation.
This letter deals with legal income not illegal income. Since 1992 real wages have not increased ‘significantly’ as Ally contends. Inflation has devoured most of the increases in wages since 1992.
Let’s look at real wages in the past 5 years, from 2006 to 2010, using the monthly minimum public sector wage as the benchmark. In that period, the wage rose by 27.37% (the PPP government claims it is 30%). and inflation was 32.7% (again, the government’s figures). That right there is the reason why cost of living is killing Guyanese.
What those figures state is that the wage increases were wiped out by inflation. Even worse, they state that the people of Guyana had to dig into their pockets to find some money from somewhere else other than their wages to pay for the basic goods they needed to live.
When prices rise higher and faster than wages, you have a serious problem on your hands. The PPP has created this problem. Wages have risen under the PPP. Only for a few. They are immune to the high cost of living. The rest are left to squeal. So the PPP has given us this mess in the past few years.
A government collecting hefty taxes from poor people and blasting it around where a few benefit with fat contracts is exactly the kind of thing that causes inflation. This problem isn’t going away. It will get worse.
Bharrat Jagdeo, a trained economist with years of experience working at the highest levels of state planning before he assumed the presidency and a former Minister of Finance, failed and flopped on the economy and on this cost of living/inflation issue in the past 5 years. Is Hydar Ally really trying to tell the Guyanese people that Donald Ramotar who has never practised any kind of economics in an official setting, never worked as a finance minister and never demonstrated to the public the intellectual grasp of economic and financial matters necessary to fix Guyana, will do better than Jagdeo?
This is a bread and butter issue. This is a food on the table issue. Those PPP bigwigs living in mansions and drawing fat paycheques from sweet government positions may not experience it, but tens of thousands of PPP supporters struggling for survival feel it every day.
Thirty to forty percent of this country lives in absolute poverty (US$510 per year or US $1.40 per day). To have inflation eating away their ability to eat is one of the most terrible legacies of the PPP. It is starvation by economic mismanagement.
At this rate of inflation, those with savings will likely see it become worthless in a PPP future under Donald Ramotar. I don’t trust him with the economy in this state.
He presents a clear and present danger to the economic stability of Guyanese if he is elected. 33.3% income tax plus 16% VAT plus loss of real wages due to inflation, plus higher interest rates on those mortgages, will take a terrible toll under an inexperienced and so far visionless Donald Ramotar. This cost of living issue is going to get
worse. Guyanese can’t trust him with taking over this economy in this state.
Finally, I wish to remind Hydar Ally that this is not about the PNC. They broke this country, wrecked it. We got that. We know that. This is about the PPP. They had 19 years at the wheel.
This is about their cost of living nightmare. We are not living in the past. We are in the present. In the here and now.
Was it the PNC or PPP running this country for the past 5 years when the price of sugar, rice, flour, oil, dhal, sardines and chicken rose faster and higher than people’s wages? Look, a hungry man inevitably becomes an angry man.
M. Maxwell

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