Senator Mark: Budget to make the rich,richer

“It is a paradise for the rich, hell house for the poor, and a nightmare for the middle class in our country” he told supporters of the United National Congress at a constituency meeting on the budget on Monday night at the Aranjuez Community Centre, Aranjuez.

Painting a grim picture of the year to come, Mark said that a national budget must be about addressing the hopes, fears and aspirations of people, and not putting considerable burdens on the working and middle classes.

He predicted that in 2017 the People’s National Movement (PNM) Government will give the Water and Sewerage Authority and Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission permission to approach the Regulated Industries Commission to increase rates for water and electricity.

Thousands of Unemployment Relief Programme and Community- based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme contractors and workers, he said, will be sent home because of the massive cut in those programmes’s allocations.

Noting that crime was the most serious issue in the country, he said that Imbert spent less than ten minutes talking about crime and national security in his budget presentation.

If the police and security services cannot solve crimes, he said, “We in UNC may have to call on your family to do what is necessary to protect yourselves if the police cannot protect you. Too many people are disappearing and there are no answers coming from Government.” Claiming that a previous PNM Government was responsible for Petrotrin’s current indebtedness, Wade said that the Oilfield Workers Trade Union under Ancil Roget will not accede to conditions, especially if it means cutting staff by half, for re-servicing the US$400 loan repayment due in 2017 and a further US$850 million loan in 2019 for the abandoned Gas to Liquid Plant that is now scrap iron.

Declaring that the PNM came into office on the basis of lies and innuendoes, he said, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley was now calling on people to change their attitudes because government can no longer provide essential public services for them.

“When he was campaigning he did not tell the people that,” Wade said. Using their propaganda machinery, he said the PNM Government was now telling the population that they reduced Value Added Tax to 12.5 percent when in fact they brought into the VAT regime 7,000 basic items that were VAT exempted.