Dear Editor,

Recently the People’s National Party (PNP) man on special projects, Dayton Campbell, spoke about his party’s plan to redistribute wealth in this country if it were to form the next Government.

Separate and apart from that statement being absolute nonsense, it smacks of a deep-seated ‘bad mind’ that the PNP harbours against “rich people”. They bad mind even their own Peter Bunting!

But a question pops up that I haven’t heard being asked of the PNP: Whose wealth are they planning to redistribute?

Jamaica is not a wealthy country by any stretch of the imagination, but depending on your viewpoint we have only a few multimillionaires and billionaires. So by that metric alone, the PNP’s plan has run aground. We do not have enough of those people to really take what they have and give it to everyone else. So where will the PNP turn to find the wealth to redistribute? The small middle class we have here? But that again poses another challenge. There are not enough people in the middle class to take much from anyway.

And, if the PNP were to go ahead anyway to take from the few rich people we have here and the middle class the effect will be a combination of the 70s and 90s all in one on the Jamaican economy and people.

So where will that wealth be found? Are they going to target the banks? That, again, won’t work, because apart from the fact that a large number of our banks are not locally owned and repatriate a lot of their profits overseas, if the PNP should win and go after them they will just close down or raise fees on their customers.

Again, where is the wealth they say they will redistribute?

One of the pathetic features of Jamaican politics is the lack of properly thought-out ideas to address our pressing problems. Anyone who believes that redistribution of wealth, even when you have it, will solve the problem of societal disparities of whatever sort is an idiot. One just has to look at Venezuela to understand.

Jamaica, at this point, doesn’t need outdated ideas that have never worked anywhere it had been tried in the past to solve our present problems. We need sensible ideas to move Jamaica forward.

Fabian Lewis

tyronelewis272@gmail.com