Should taxes be raised or spread around?

Patrick Rogers

It is widely speculated that the budget for the new financial year will contain increase taxation due to the current economic crunch. The country is in recession and facing debts that grow by leaps and bounds.  Today at a protest outside the National Assembly, B.P.P. Leader Patrick Rogers, who is a professional accountant, provided some options on how government can raise revenues.

Patrick Rogers, Party Leader, B.P.P.

“What they have been doing is totally wrong, which is why we’ve gotten to where we are. The worst thing any economist can tell you to do is to raise taxes ina wah time of recession. So we’ve had basically an economy that has been in decline for three successive quarters; the final results and final quarter yet to come in. The truth of the matter is that the worst thing that you want to do is raise taxes so I hope to God that they dot do that. We don’t control those policies; dah dehn control that. But assuming that they do not raise tax, if they were to expand the base, then we may be in a position to start meeting we obligations that we have. The problem is that there are certain sectors of our economy that truly are not paying their fair share of taxes. And it goes right back to the issue of campaign financing. Let’s look at expanding the base of GST; taking off zero-rated, putting five percent on the bread basket items; and make sure that everything pay and everybody pay and then you don’t have to raise it to fifteen percent…maybe yo drop it to ten percent. Just as wah example…these are some of the things we’d like to see being played around with because wah economy ina recession.”