Much Ado About Little
We make too much fuss about the annual national budget. Really, we do. What real benefits does it bring us as a society?
Every year, we give the Minister of Finance more importance than he should have by dutifully listening to him give a speech in parliament and then reacting to that speech from various, usually frustrated, perspectives. But the budget presentation has long been a situation in which the minister describes international or local economic conditions, proposes sums to be spent, bases his sums on some price per barrel of oil, says how he is going to raise those funds, increases or decreases the allocation to a government ministry or the Tobago House of Assembly, increases or decreases the amount for debt servicing, increases a tax here and decreases another there, talks about measures to relieve the suffering of the poor and disadvantaged, etc., etc.. He proposes and dispenses from his discretions (and, no doubt, those of the prime minister and political investors) from on high, and there is nothing most of us can do to change anything we don't like.
We are outside of the proposing process, reduced essentially to either ineffectual commentary or ineffectual silence. Ineffectual in the sense of not causing any change in the proposals and dispensations. And it is all predictable.
The captains of industry will usually say it is a good budget if they perceive their businesses will not unduly suffer as a result of any measure and, usually, they do have reason to say the budget is a good one. The social activists will usually complain about a variety of things, including: insufficient attention to the plight of the poor and most vulnerable; lack of transparency in the measures; little consultation with the different constituencies in the nation; and continuing favouring of the privileged business classes. The opposition, recognising the futility of counter-measures, will take the opportunity to score political points, focusing on waste, mismanagement, and corruption. The Tobago House of Assembly will lament that it continues to be at the mercy of the central government. And independent commentators like myself will point to the tyranny of the exercise and to the fact that it hardly advances us, whether intellectually, materially, or socio-politically.
Yetming's budget (and note how the thing is described!) is no different from previous ones in its dispensation from on high, in the ordinariness of its arithmetic, in the narrowness of its field of discretions, in the ready embrace by the Chamber of Commerce, in the ineffectuality of our commentary, in the opposition focus on waste and corruption, in the futility of this noise I am making here. Mr. Yetming will get his way despite the noises raised against him - subject, of course, to his party's slim, fractious majority in parliament working.
It brings relief, thank God, to old age pensioners and other sufferers, but it does not make them any less poor. It takes VAT off toiletries, but there is no guarantee that prices on these goods will not go up. It reduces personal income tax, but that will avail little against a rising cost of living. It proposes an expenditure of $15.7B, but we are not sure how it will be funded, and we know from experience that there will be many off-budget expenses. It gives the Tobago House of Assembly some $400M less than they asked for, allocating $708M, which is a mere 4.5% of the whole, calculated, doubtless, to satisfy the Dispute Resolution Commission's recommendation of a minimum of 4.03%, as well as to silence both the executive council and the opposition in the Assembly. And it does all of this without accounting to us about how the last budget was operationalised!
Tyranny is institutionalised in Yetming's budget, as in all others. It resides in the process - in the ministerial dictating of measures in his own (and his narrow circle of preferred advisors') discretions, with no legal or operational requirement of any kind that he must accommodate any outsider ideas. True, he held audience with certain groups and organisations before his speech and heard their proposals, and he probably took some of their proposals on board. But the decision to take any of those proposals was essentially a discretionary one.
For instance, he held discussions with the executive council, who argued that he should allocate $1.1B to Tobago, but, in exercise of his and his circle's discretions, he gave only $708M - a considerable $400M less. And if he had given $500M rather than $708M, who or what could have made him do otherwise?
The annual national budget is essentially a political instrument used to do the cabinet's (read Finance minister's, prime minister's, and political investors') bidding. It is a creature of a decision-making process that is controlled by this cabinet and that pretends to be consultative, but that is really elitist and exclusivist. To be part of it, you have to be part of the cabinet, and to be part of the cabinet, you have to be a serious investor, or coalition partner with real clout, or there must be constitutional reform that legislates decision sharing and budget allocation in accordance with a percentage formula tied to a clearly defined framework of political constituencies.
Read that last sentence again. Obviously, the last option is to be preferred for the greatest social benefit. But how will it come about if we behave as if it is up to those in power at any given time to act?
Until constitutional reform of a particular kind happens, and until the social consciousness that must drive it into being happens, we will continue to fuss immaterially about the budget.
Archives / Winford James Homepage / Previous Page
^^ Back to top
