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GUEST COLUMN

THE property tax is a bad deal. It gives us what we don’t want, taxes and fails to give us what we want: more political authority. It shifts the burden of fiscal responsibility on the backs of the people, whilst the Government gets away scot-free.
It purports to give us more financial wherewithal of our own local affairs; but this is doubtful. It is the same folk, in the same bureaucracy-rich structure, who will run the show; with at least three sets of bureaucrats (called committees) added to the proposed reform, to scuttle more of our taxes.
The intelligentsia on the ground, people who live in our own constituencies, districts and villages, who know the nuts and bolts of their communities, who can manage, mobilise, bring change on the ground, have been left unincluded. It is more of the same; our property tax will be frittered away in more bureaucracy, more central government waste, more questionable spending.
Our people need more formal authority to combat the ills bedevilling our communities – gun and drug crimes, praedial larceny, unemployment, drug abuse, family dispute, food shortage and hunger, road and drainage disrepair, illicit land acquisition and practices, and incoming climate events like storms, flooding and landslides – not more taxes, going towards more committee-rich corporations.
The benefits of property tax must redound fully and fluidly to the people on the ground, not frittered away by government bureaucrats, technocrats or party loyalists and hacks.
Instead of releasing the burden of governance from the backs of the government onto the shoulders of the people, government has released their fiscal and financial burdens from their backs onto the backs of the people.
But the property tax is drip by drip water torture. It is being advertised as a small tax on rentable income on our homes, homesteads, our families. But it is no small-thing. As we all know in wealth-building or wealth-depletion, one by one fills, or depletes, the basket.
In an already tax-burdened society, aggravated in the current financial cycle, 2015 to 2024, by our tight-fisted, quick-to-tax Minister of Finance, this additional tax will cut cash short in our pockets, cheat us of our individual rights to spend and invest our own monies, stimulate and grow the economy, which we can do far better than governments can.
Between 2015 and 2023, the Government imposed a plethora of tax-collecting policies, measures, and taxes. IMF style.
Adding to sharp increases in commodity prices (food, gas), impending WASA/T&TEC increases, Petrotrin shutdown, layoffs, and general inflationary conditions (8.7 per cent December 2022 to 5.7 per cent in May 2023).
This is a far cry from 1958, when the Mighty Sparrow challenged Prime Minister Eric Williams’ PAYE income tax: “We ask for new Government/ Now they taking every cent.” Williams took one chop. Our Minister of Finance exacts the skill of the fencer, swift slashes, a thousand cuts, to snip off the financial buttons on our breast and belly plates, flagellate us.
The property tax ought not to be imposed until local government, managed by the local intelligentsia, for example, constituency chiefs, constituency executives, polling division captains (approximately 35 per constituency), constituency councils/boards, super-abundantly representing our people on the ground, is agreed to.
And implemented. We ought not to pay property taxes, until we are assured of value for our tax-dollars; and until the people have meaningful formal authority big-time on the ground. Our people need more political authority, not more punishing taxes on their property and family incomes into perpetuity.
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