JLP Cannot Be Pnp-lite…

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.