It’s spider and the fly with Kamla promises

THE EDITOR: The time has come for the electorate to demand that all political leaders state clearly how they intend to fund the promises they make on political or other platforms. They must tell us what existing benefits they intend to decrease or excise in order to accommodate their grandiose plans aimed at attracting our votes.

I read Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s budget reply-cum-party manifesto and wondered whether she knew we are in 2019 and not 2010. That oil prices are below US$60 a barrel and not US$100-plus as in 2010.

Where would she get the money to finance her plan if oil prices remain depressed and she repeals the property tax, scraps the revenue authority, and reduces personal/corporation tax?

Very few of her “prosperity engines” can start without an injection of considerable funding. Her proposed “financing policies and strategies” seem more for the long term rather than the urgency that is required now, if they believe their own rhetoric that the country is in a bad economic shape.

Persad-Bissessar’s election pitch reminded me so much of Mary Howitt’s children’s poem, The Spider and the Fly. The cunning spider was trying to seduce a fly to enter its web using flattery and charm.

“Will you walk into my parlour,” said the spider to the fly. “Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you may spy.”

After a long seductive dialogue, the fly fell for flattery ending up on the spider’s dinner plate. Substitute “promises” for “flattery” and you end up like the fly.

HARRY PARTAP

via e-mail