It appears that the days of the ‘election budget’ may be over and we were not even granted the courtesy of an official announcement from Government. Caught in the vice grip of an International Monetary Fund agreement, with strictures that ensure payback, the Government has no excess of goodies to hand out in preparation for capturing the gullible on election day.

The whipping boy, cigarettes, were taxed, and that is always popular among the majority who do not smoke. More people take buses and route taxis than the number who drive cars so the effect of the gas tax will not be felt by most of our people in the immediate term. But somewhere down the line, given just the right mix of common sense and chaos, even the regulated busman, the unregulated taxi driver may decide to pass on something to the commuting public

A man who stops at a gas station to purchase 20 litres of petrol will be paying at least $140 more, which is more that the cost for a single litre of gas. The tax on electricity bills in excess of 350 kWh per month will not affect the poorer in the society, but those excesses will find a way to work themselves through the system until it eventually affects poorer households.

The PNP Administration doesn’t want to start the inevitable mass retrenchment of government workers because that is one of their most faithful blocs of voters. So it pretends that it has a plan to grow the GDP so that the size of government in relation to GDP (as per IMF condition) can be met without the firings.

Many voices have been complaining, and we have been here before. Even now I can remember an ‘austerity’ budget of the early 1970s. Certainly this is a part of the ‘bitter medicine’ that former PM Andrew Holness promised would happen after the latter part of 2011. No matter which party took power in an IMF regime, if we were all expecting it, why are acting so shocked and angry?

I think I have an answer to that. The people of this country have always accepted that governments in Jamaica are essentially fountains of corruption. They know that too many politicians use the ballot boxes to feather their own nests and lay the groundwork for many terms in office by which time a small tribe among the chosen few will have become multimillionaires.

But somehow our people, especially the man at street level, share the view that the politician will always find a way to share some of that loot with him. It’s a moving target, he surmises, but he will buy the promise that if it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow. So he lives for those tomorrows which hardly ever come until another election is upon us.

At that stage the usual political gimmickry takes over and the party with the best show of that will win.

The man who smokes is highly unlikely to vote out the PNP because it made cigarettes more expensive to him. Sure, he will be angry, and even refer to his own party as ‘wicked’ just so that he can mesh with the present mood of controlled anger.

At the other end of the PNP Government’s thinking, the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce has made the grand announcement that investors are about ready to push US$5 billion into ventures which will constitute a logistics hub.

One gets the sense that we have heard this before. At the same time, if there was some authenticity to this announcement, I can quite understand that agreements of this nature, until they are officially ready for full roll-out, cannot just be blurted out as companies operate in a very competitive environment and one would not want to telegraph any business directions.

We really do not know if the minister is selling us another ‘ullo’ or he is still crawling in his appeal for something beyond ministerial relevance, maybe even significance. For now, however, he gets to hide behind that cloak of confidentiality, and I am certain he will be asking us to trust him.

While it is said that every government needs a really big project, either government involved as in the China Harbour projects or big private sector roll-outs, as would happen under any logistics hub outlay, the real job-producing areas in the micro and small enterprise sectors continue highly underfunded.

Rev Stanley Redwood, who not so long ago was PNP-installed president of the Senate, until he made a somewhat hurried exit from politics and the country, posted on his Facebook page a few days ago the following:

“In my lower six physics class at MC eons ago I was taught about tensile stress, strain and strength. All I can remember now is that they relate to the amount of pressure a material can absorb and manage. When force exceeds strength, there is deformation and/or breakage; depending on how brittle the material is.”

And then, in light of the recently read budget, he asked: “Is there a thing as socio-economic tensile stress?”

Maybe the Government knows how much more we can take before we bend and break.

Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn, the JLP caretaker for West Rural St Andrew, is likely to have a tough time going up against first time, surprise winner in that constituency, Paul Buchanan, as lately Paul seems to believe that he has done enough to merit additional time at the wicket.

In the interim, although very few people in the constituency know her, she has been using social media to transmit some of what she has observed in her travels abroad and especially in the region. On her Facebook page she posted the following, which gives a not unexpected comparison between Jamaica and St Lucia:

“I’ve been in St Lucia for 5 days now and not one person bothered me to clean my car windscreen. I have watched the tourists walking in the town without being bothered, going along their merry way. The taxis line up in an orderly manner to transport the tourists. Let me not forget the driving here, it’s amazing! No bad driving and persons telling each other what to do to themselves. Oh yes, as you approach a pedestrian crossing all cars stop!”

This supports my point that, as a people, as a nation, we Jamaicans are socially underdeveloped, and a large contributor to this is that bad behavior has an immediate utility value in this island. Speak and act decent and one is laughed at. Act like a hooligan and one gets placed at the head of the line.

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