Ok, history always repeats itself, when was last time “ everything” went right. I do not believe eever.

Every Government since 1967 finds an excuse to run up the debt and borrow money.
This time around they are dumber than ever. Devaluation coming regardless what these political hacks try to preach. If they are religious enough, maybe they pray the Bahamas does not get a good hurricane hit this year. Will be t 12 Billion then in debt..

The civil service is not bloated ......... there is just a poor use of human resources, no succession planning and excessive hiring of unskilled workers ........... It needs serious overhaul & reform

There is the need to hire (or train) more skilled workers ..... Why have thousands of clerks and janitresses, when there are no middle managers and technical persons?

Then, there is the problem of having 40-year career (old) bosses that frustrate and discourage the millennials from making meaningful careers in the civil service.

You must be an over-paid civil servant in order to be able to say "the civil service is not bloated".

The Tribune's editorial staff describing Zhivargo Laing as a "financial guru" has to be the joke of the month. LMAO

The man with one eye is king now.

Bloated or not, here’s the fundamental problem: The Bahamas, with about 400K people — roughly the size of a middling U.S. city — has to provide all the services of an independent nation: defense, health, education, police, licensing, infrastructure, customs, immigration, all that.

In addition, the gov’t has taken on the massive responsibility of services that are run by private, free-market entities in many nations: power, water, phones, hospitals, airports, an airline, etc., etc.

Little wonder if the government seems “bloated.”

I disagree. Decades of unchecked and rampant political corruption, fraud, waste and mismanagement have been the primary drivers of the very costly, grossly over-bloated and most unproductive civil workforce we have today.

Every Bahamian would be enjoying a standard of living and quality of life that would be the envy of the world were it not for the system of corrupt political capitalism and cronyism that has become the main stay of our economy. It's a horribly corrupt system designed to keep most Bahamians dumbed-down and oppressed as it goes about greatly enriching the political elite, their financial backers, their favoured local business cronies, their family members, their select few friends and, of course, their equally corrupt and unscrupulous foreign corporate friends and foreign business partners.

P.S.: The ratio of our public sector headcount (including the headcount of all of our government controlled enterprises) to our nation's total population has been ridiculously and unsustainably high for decades as a result of successive failed political leaders like Minnis using government employment as the means of masking their incompetence and failed social and economic policies.

Take away the 25,000 civil servants (out of a 200,000 labour force) ........ and see how well the country will work ............ You criticize, but have NO solutions.

ZZZZZzzzzzz.......

Thompson and the atheist are just talking the cheap talk. cream pie in the sky talk
it means nothing ZERO.

A cute term they like to use is ‘refinancing.’ This under normal circumstances refers to when an individual or a company or country ‘cleans’ up its loan portfolio by either paying off older loans or several small loans and combining them into one or paying off loans at a high interest rate and replacing them with loans that bear lower interest. Today governments are borrowing money to pay off loans they cannot service and they are usually doing this at a higher interest rate. So they must then go back to the taxpayer to raise these additional funds to service these debts. So this results in an increase in the cost of living for the taxpayers. Many may own businesses, so they in turn increase the cost of their goods and services. This may, in turn, cause a reduction in consumer confidence which will eventually lead to reduction in consumption. This is known as ‘stagflation.’ Consumption is decreasing but prices are still increasing because of increases in taxes, so because of reduced consumption, government may still not be able to realize its revenue forecasts despite increased taxes. So what does the government do. Can it cut spending? That depends on how leveraged it is. Can it increase taxes again? Well to do so will only start the cycle repeating itself again, But this time the results will be more crucial and devastating . Firstly, there will be those individuals and businesses who can’t afford additional tax increases or any increases, for that matter and so they will just disappear off the grid. Businesses will close and individuals will either drop out of society or move to a less taxed jurisdictions. In any event government will realize less tax revenue. Then there will be individuals and businesses who will refuse to allow government to place any additional tax burden on them. Again these people will close down their businesses, move to a less taxed jurisdiction or just simply refuse to pay taxes. So now government has placed itself in a situation where it’s creditors and knocking down its doors and it cannot collect one additional dollar in taxes from its citizens. In fact it is collecting less tax dollars now than before the crisis started. So not only can it not service it’s debt but it can no longer provide many of its essential services does the economy collapse?