Dear Editor,

I would like to take time out to voice my opinion with regard to the Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller’s speech at her party’s annual conference held on September 21, 2014.

While watching her speak I was shocked to hear her utter the now infamous words of “We do less with more money”. Now one must ask if this is a Freudian slip of the tongue, or was something lost in translation?

Let us dissect the above quote for a minute, so that we can get a better understanding for a simple layman like me. So, what she is saying is that, since assuming office in 2011, the dollar has slid from $82 to $113, therefore the Government is doing less with more money because of the devaluation of the Jamaica dollar? Is it because the debt has increased to $2 trillion? OK, I think I am getting closer to understanding her less-for-more-money utterance.

So, let’s go a little further with what we will now call Portianomics. As a child, my grandmother used to say: “You have to find ways to stretch your money, so that it can go a long way.” I can recall at times my grandmother would take me to Coronation Market to buy provisions and she painstakingly negotiated down the cost of items with the higglers in order for them to lower their selling cost, so that she would have money left over to spend another day. Now we used to call granny’s method Economics 101, and it was a proven success. But it appears that Portia has failed this class with her doctrine of Portianomics: we do less with more money. If granny were alive, she would surely take Portia to task and she would surely say to her: “I can show you how to tek yuh hand mek fashion.”

In truth, though, Portia’s speech was nothing but an empty barrel with a lot of noise, because it did not address the main issues that are affecting the Jamaica populace. She was not specific in nature with any policies, just the same redistribution of resources from the working class to the ‘less for more money black hole’.

Where in her conference speech did she mention the runaway crime rate and how her Government will tackle it, the chickungunya outbreak, the college graduates that are not able to secure employment, the three-year wait for surgery in our hospital facilities, the 21 per cent increase in residential electrical rates requested by Jamaica Public Service (JPS), the recent report of the public debt increasing to $2.09 trillion and passing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tests, but failing the people’s test?

You see, Madam Prime Minister, these are the important issues the Jamaican people wanted you to address and not just speaking to create euphoria to whip up your base in preparation for the next election.

Over to you, Madam Prime Minister, because the people would like to know where that extra money went for the less service you paid for.

Patrick Callum

patrickcallum@yahoo.com