EDITOR, The Tribune.

To those Bahamians who were paying attention, the emptiness, shallowness and myopia of the FNM’s supposed project to assist middle class professionals with access to affordable land was sharply exposed by the response of the Clearing Banks Association to the initiative.

Warning that its members are motivated by risk, rather than politics, it said “We don’t want to be in the land selling business or the liquidation business. We want to give (loans) to a customer who will pay their loans”, which may disqualify many applicants under such a scheme, notwithstanding even government guarantees.

If this latest political gimmick has the feel of a distraction from the real issues facing our country (young professionals included) that’s because it is exactly that, as the Clearing Banks Association seems to understand.

At its root, the Bahamian middle class (or what’s left of it) does not have a land problem. It has a disposable income problem. And this problem relates directly to thirty years of policies (initiated by the FNM but never sufficiently reversed by the PLP) that shift disposable income away from the middle and working classes and into the hands of wealthy corporations and individuals.

When it came to power in 1992, the Free National Movement gifted its wealthy backers in the jewelry, furniture, car sales and consumer goods industries with a policy always resisted by the Pindling government: it permitted them to enter unlimited direct salary deduction contracts with government employees.

While even conscionable employers like Atlantis restricted the scope of these contracts, not so for government, whose employees often took home a pittance after deductions for credited consumption. Does it take a genius to see that this, among other policies, militates against a landowning middle class?

At the same time, government’s senseless and internationally embarrassing refusal to tax the incomes of wealthy individuals and domestic corporations (including those it gifted with direct access to civil servants’ income) has been financed partly at the expense of (frozen) public sector wages and partly by the accumulation of crippling fees, taxes and charges on everything – from 12 percent VAT to the $140 charged for a COVID-test (free in most countries) and increased Bahamasair rates to travel inter-island.

Having created an environment where wages are intentionally suppressed while costs increase daily and the rich live tax free, government now proposes to solve the problem of a dwindling middle class by giving out Crown lands to “young professionals” who even the banks can foresee will never be able to pay for homes on them. It would be comical if it were not so tragic.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

April 20, 2021.