Addressing a large crowd in Junction, South East St Elizabeth Thursday night, JLP shadow minister of finance Audley Shaw said the People’s National Party (PNP) has been getting a free pass from the media while proposals of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) are being subjected to rigorous examination.
“I was on an interview last night. I said that we can create 250,000 new jobs in Jamaica. Dem a question me, how yuh gwine do it. Which sectors yuh gwine get it out of,” “When Peter Phillips say him was going to create 100,000 jobs nobody don’t ask him nuttin,” . “We are going to transform the same Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) … PNP say dem can create 30,000 … 40,000 jobs, Labour Party say we can create 75,000 jobs in Business Process Outsourcing,”. “If we can create nearly 100,000 jobs in that, we nuh can create 250,000 in everything else? Manufacturing, agriculture, everything else”.
I a am little dissapointed that Audley Shaw would be talking about Government creating jobs. Audley you are trying to get back into Gordon House as Minister of Finance. Your arguments sounds eerily like a socialist selling a snake oil message of Government expansion.
A market economy in Jamaica depends on..
(1) Empowering, equipping, and paying police.
(2) Crime is reduced.
(3)Eliminate graft, corruption and bureaucracy.
(4) Lower taxes.
(5) Investors return with real private sector jobs.
(6) As investors return keep lowering taxes but widening the tax net which spur more economic growth.
That is how you create real jobs in a market economy.
The methodology Audley Shaw articulated is exactly the way Peter Phillips and the PNP goes about creating jobs. That method may produce a few jobs for a while which ultimately are not sustainable. You cannot build a sky-scraper without a foundation. With the smallest tremor that building comes crashing down.
There is no wonder when a slight wind blows hundreds of workers are laid off from their jobs in Jamaica because of this kind of thinking.
Unfortunately Shaw seem to have accepted that path as a viable path to sustainable job creation which it isn’t.
Neither Government nor the private sector can create growth in a chaotic society plagued with bureaucratic incompetence , high crime, high tax rates, Government corruption, and overall chaos.
I understand the ever present lure to appeal to pander to the most base desires of voters around election time. However what the JLP can least afford is to be “PNP-lite”.
Jamaicans know what the PNP is about.
The JLP must be what the JLP always stood for, which is principled economic management beginning with low crime, which inspires investor confidence.
Eventually Jamaicans will grow tired of the nonsense and show the PNP the door.
When will it happen?
That’s above my pay grade.