Overtaxed!

Barbadians are reeling from the weight of too many taxes being imposed by the current Democratic Labour Party administration.

Opposition Member of Parliament for St. George North, Gline Clarke, made this clear during his contribution to the Financial Statement and Budgetary Proposals 2017 debate, posing the question: “Can a country’s Parliament impose taxes upon taxes without regard for the poor and vulnerable, or without regard for the working poor?

“People across Barbados are suffering. Some cannot buy food, some cannot buy clothes, people go from pay-cheque to pay- cheque. Some people have to cook one day a week and it goes on and on. We have seen poverty in this country that we have never seen before,” he lamented.

Agreeing with his leader’s call for a Cost of Living Allowance, especially for pensioners, Clarke said it is important to look carefully at how to treat such matters, especially in an environment where persons are reeling under poverty.

Speaking on the decision to raise the Social Responsibility Levy to ten per cent from two per cent, he said that this would create hardships for the population as everything would be affected, and posited that it would have been better to increase VAT to 22.5 per cent.

Pointing out that citizens have to insist that Parliament be responsible for the taxes that are collected, he took to task the government on the issue of road taxes.

“Look at the roads. Government increased road taxes for vehicles in 2008 by 60 per cent. You have bad roads across Barbados. I cannot understand how you can increase road taxes and have less repairs to roads being done,” Clarke stressed.

The former Minister of Housing also accused the government of not providing housing for low-income earners, advising members of the public to “not go to National Housing anymore because they are not providing any solutions for the poor”. (JMB)