“Budget is tone-deaf” – Opposition Leader

Nov 27, 2018 News

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Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo has condemned the 2019 budget as “tone-deaf”, and an indication that the Coalition government is being condescending towards the people of Guyana.
Jagdeo held a press conference last night after the reading of the budget by Finance Minister Winston Jordan.
“I’m very, very disappointed,” he said, “I had great expectations that this government would have listened to what they heard from people in the local government elections, and the people’s widespread dissatisfaction with their record.”
He emphasised that it is a lengthy budget that is filled with repetition.
“It seems as though different people wrote different sections of this budget, and then someone hastily combined all of these sections into what we heard today.”

Jagdeo said that the Finance Minister went over the same topics repeatedly, and made an incoherent presentation.
“I thought that, now that the government is faced with a no-confidence motion, it would have heeded the concerns of the people.
Jagdeo said that it seems that the Minister read out the entire work programme of the Guyana Revenue Authority, the Central Bank, and the Accountant General’s department.
Jagdeo said there are many promises in the budget about massive projects in the future, and that the Minister explained its objectives at great length. However, Jagdeo believes that many of these projects are unlikely to happen, or at least, will not happen for years. He said that the Minister built up the people’s optimism for multiple projects, going on at great lengths, only to say, at the end of his explanations, that the government will conduct a feasibility study in 2019.
“This is not a budget,” he said, “It is sterile and full of platitudes.
He said that the Minister is doing the same thing he did when reading out the 2018 budget, last year; that the Minister had given figures, then by January, the figures drastically changed for the worse.
The Minister read out a series of measures that he said will improve welfare, but Jagdeo said he highly doubts that the government’s plans will have a positive effect on vulnerable Guyanese.
Jagdeo said that when the government presented the budget, they presented their tax reform measures as a great relief. However, he stated that one of the key issues the PPP/C heard about on the campaign trail for local government elections is that there was a massive growth in taxes since the Coalition came into office. Although the government presented tax reforms giving up $3.5B in revenue, Jagdeo said that he sees it as insignificant, as he had hoped that the budget would offer a bigger tax write-off.
He said that in the last year the PPP produced a budget, in 2014, there was a total tax stake of $135B. Now, he said, the actual figure is $199B, a $64B increase since the last budget produced by the PPP/C.
“So the Minister said we collected $7B as a result of the amnesty. The amnesty is over, so you have to net out $7B from the $199B that they collected in 2017, because that will not be repeated in 2019. So that takes you to about $192B”. He said that this year, $223B in taxes will be collected, a $31B increase.
“This means that between 2014 and now, the government would have collected $88B more per year on a base of $135B. That’s an over 65% increase in taxes.”
Jagdeo said that, for example, the PPP/C proposed removing VAT on construction material, and that the government removed it from concrete blocks, but not on sandstone, cement, and all of the other materials that they had put VAT on in the first place. He said that he also expected the government to come up with a series of policies to help stimulate the private sector, but that he heard no such thing.
On the proposed road from Parika to Bartica, Jagdeo told the media that it’s not going to happen; that the late president Dr. Cheddi Jagan had proposed this road since the 1960s. He said the government is only creating the impression that it will happen.
On the matter of the proposed bridge for the Demerara River, Jagdeo said that the government did an illegal feasibility study, which is now subject of a police inquiry, and that the study did not find a three-lane bridge feasible. He said they have to redo a feasibility study on a four-lane bridge, which will cost 60% more.
He then turned to the absence of job creation initiatives.
“Minister Jordan has mentioned the government’s proposition to inject $1.7B into youth initiatives, but when you disaggregate, a significant part is on administrative costs.”
Jagdeo said that the government’s figures provided about jobs they have created are fictitious, and that the government has failed to indicate where these jobs were created.
“What sort of relief does this budget bring? We hear a lot about crime fighting, but most of the money is going to the building of Georgetown Prison and the completion of the Mazaruni prisons.”
“First oil is the only thing in town,” Jagdeo said.
“The government is saying ‘We don’t care what the people think’. To pass a budget like this, [Jordan] must be a closet hater of this government. I can’t find much good to talk about. We can’t support this budget, not in its current formulation.”

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