Budgetary proposals should serve the whole country: PM

Prime Minister Freundel Stuart reminded citizens that budgetary proposals are constructed to serve the country as a whole and not one sector or individual.

 

“Every year when the Budget date has been announced there is a tendency in Barbados for the public to jump into the fray and sectoral interests to announce what they want to see in the Budget, what they want out of the Budget and what decisions the Minister of Finance should make… And invariably when people’s prayers have not been answered, the Budget is dismissed as not being a good Budget because it did not have anything in it for them,” he opined.

 

Speaking moments before the three-day debate was wrapped up in the Lower House on Thursday night, he stated the Budget was a tool of macro-economic management and therefore, while sections of the community are entitled to look at their own financial interest, the Minister of Finance has to take a holistic view.

 

He also suggested that the Opposition Barbados Labour Party was mainly in agreement with the measures introduced in the 2016 Financial Statement and Budgetary Proposals and commended Minister of Finance, Christopher Sinckler, for sticking to the task.

 

Stuart said that the last eight years had been very difficult in the island’s economic history.

 

“When the present Government came into office in the middle of January 2008, it was just after there had been a financial meltdown in the richest and most powerful country and economy on earth – the United States of America; the contagion of which touched the entire Western world and of course, affected small open economies like Barbados in fundamental ways.

 

“That cannot be wished away. Nobody uses it as an excuse; what we use it for is to provide context for whatever has happened not only here in Barbados, but in other parts of the Caribbean and parts of the Western world,” he added.