What is your bottom line?

Aug 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

There are persons who are more concerned about the Budget of the government than they are about their own budgeting. Many of them do not even bother to Budget.
They know that their income will never match their spending and so they simply go through each month and each year as normal, and hope that some backer of good fortune will befall their way.
There are a great many people in Guyana who are playing the game of luck and chance. They can be seen each week buying Lotto tickets in the hope of winning. They have a dream about their own lives and that dream depends on the Lotto.
A great many people also live on the support of friends and relatives. Some of this support is local. One of the things that Guyanese are good at is bumming. We can beg.
There are some guys who have a lot of money in their pocket but still are always asking for a raise. It is almost mechanical with them. They see you and they instinctively ask for a freck.
Many others depend on the kindness of their relatives from overseas. If they ever went overseas and saw how hard their relatives had to work for that US$100 that is sent back to help support them, they would not ask as often for help.
But they believe that their relatives are sleeping on a bed of roses, that things are comfortable and that the nicer things in life come easy, and so they too compulsively like to beg for things.
The Finance Minister has read his Budget for the country. There is supposed to be a small deficit, which means that the country will spend more that it can raise in revenues plus what it will withdraw from monies held as retained earnings and savings.
The government has a good bottom line. It can finance its deficit through borrowing.
So what about the average Guyanese? What is that person’s bottom line? How much is he or she in the red? And how is the deficit to be financed?
These are questions which the average man does not think of in technical terms. They think of it in terms of living. They have to live. They make choices. They do things to survive.
They hope that the government will not mess up the economy and make life difficult for them. But like the government, they cannot be certain as to how things will unfold.
They do not know whether they will still have their jobs tomorrow. Forty-two persons from the One Laptop per Family Programme were put on the breadline and not a squeak was heard from the Guyana Trades Union Congress. But no sooner did the Minister of Finance complete his Budget, the TUC issued a statement.
People have to look after their own well-being. They have to take care of themselves. They have to live within their means. You can have a great deal and still be unhappy. In fact, the happiest persons around are those who have little. They live within their means. They live within their Budgets.
How are you living?

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What is your bottom line?

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