Dear Editor,
Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips has been declared ‘Man of the Year’. No well-thinking Jamaican envies or begrudges him for that achievement. What we are more focused on are those more important achievements to which a finance minister should be able to lay claim.
To date, Dr Phillips has not been able to lay claim to any meaningful and robust level of growth, and that for me is where rubber hits the road.
I must use this opportunity to dismiss the myth that it is Dr Phillips and the People’s National Party (PNP) who have stabilised the Jamaican economy and brought prudent fiscal management to bear on Jamaica’s state of affairs.
Not so at all, because it was the Jamaica Labour Party that rescued Jamaica from the fiscal recklessness of yesteryears by ensuring that project overruns were no longer the norm and that fiscal prudence became the order of the day and enshrined into law by way of fiscal responsibility legislation.
Whenever I hear the baseless and erroneous claims that Dr Peter Phillips is to be credited for stabilising the economy, I find it as laughable as claims by the Spanish that it was Christopher Columbus who discovered Jamaica. One cannot discover somewhere that had already been discovered. Neither can there be the stabilisation of an economy that was already stable.
Upon demitting office following the December 29, 2011 election, the JLP handed over the following to the PNP: interest rate at 6.25 per cent, mortgage rate as low as 9.5 per cent, net international reserves at US$2 billion, exchange rate at US$1 to $86, and economic growth of 1.7 per cent for 2011.
Kimberly Rowe
kimberlyrowe3@gmail.com
Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips has been declared ‘Man of the Year’. No well-thinking Jamaican envies or begrudges him for that achievement. What we are more focused on are those more important achievements to which a finance minister should be able to lay claim.
To date, Dr Phillips has not been able to lay claim to any meaningful and robust level of growth, and that for me is where rubber hits the road.
I must use this opportunity to dismiss the myth that it is Dr Phillips and the People’s National Party (PNP) who have stabilised the Jamaican economy and brought prudent fiscal management to bear on Jamaica’s state of affairs.
Not so at all, because it was the Jamaica Labour Party that rescued Jamaica from the fiscal recklessness of yesteryears by ensuring that project overruns were no longer the norm and that fiscal prudence became the order of the day and enshrined into law by way of fiscal responsibility legislation.
Whenever I hear the baseless and erroneous claims that Dr Peter Phillips is to be credited for stabilising the economy, I find it as laughable as claims by the Spanish that it was Christopher Columbus who discovered Jamaica. One cannot discover somewhere that had already been discovered. Neither can there be the stabilisation of an economy that was already stable.
Upon demitting office following the December 29, 2011 election, the JLP handed over the following to the PNP: interest rate at 6.25 per cent, mortgage rate as low as 9.5 per cent, net international reserves at US$2 billion, exchange rate at US$1 to $86, and economic growth of 1.7 per cent for 2011.
Kimberly Rowe
kimberlyrowe3@gmail.com