> Jacqui Bend, managing director of CIBC Bahamas, told Tribune Business that the fee structure adjustments are due to rising business costs.

The Tribune's news editor, Rashad Rolle, should pointed have disclosed in this article the latest annual profits of cibc, rbc and Scotia Bank derived from their banking activities in The Bahamas.

> Gowon Bowe, the Clearing Banks Association chairman, has said that regulating bank fees is a slippery slope and that the country is moving toward communism with such an approach.

Yet Bowe, who is the CEO of a bank, is a big time proponent of a new minimum 15% income tax rate being introduced across the board for all Bahamians/residents and their businesses in order to fund an even larger welfare state that is already crippled as a result of decades of out-of-control waste, fraud and outright theft attributable to corrupt elected and other thieving and incomptent senior officials in every government agency, department and state-owned enterprise.

Bingo!

The current passenger head tax paid by the cruise ship enterprises needs to be quadrupled with immediate effect. And, in addition, a new environment preservation tax of at $100 per passenger head should be levied on all cruise ship passengers each and every time they enter our territorial waters without exception.

Trump's buffoonery is disliked by many but it is not nearly as inexcusable and dangerous as the Marxist-Leninist ideology of Comrade Kamala.

All that she is and what she represents are unfathomably sinister and evil to the very core.

Someone needs to remind Bowe that government policies are needed that grow the private sector by easing the ability of existing businesses to do business, promoting the start-up of new businesses, and increasing the percentage of the Bahamian economy owned by Bahamians.

Government policies should be focused on creating new private sector jobs, preventing an undesirable concentration of wealth among only a few Bahamians, and stopping the selling of our nation's scarce resources, especially land, to the highest foreign bidder.

Decades of bad government policies fostered by corrupt politicians at the highest levels, have made our domestic economy much too fragile and weak to withstand any kind of additional significant tax burden. The introduction of income tax at this time would only serve to grow the size of our already grossly over-bloated, unproductive and very costly government (public sector).

Common sense dictates that many other things must be put in order before meaningful tax reform can be properly entertained. To do otherwise only invites additional tax dollars being used to feed the growth of government while exacerbating the shrinkage in our nation's private sector tax base. That's just 101 economics!

Notice too how the ministry of education (Hanna-Martin) makes sure the private school statistics are meshed in with the public school statistics in order to deceitfully hide just how dysfunctional and bad the public schools are at teaching their students.

Too many of the public school 'graduates' are border line literate at best. Frankly, too many of the teachers on government's payroll are themselves border line literate and lack the professionalism and demeanor for teaching students in any setting.

And make no mistake about it, Hanna-Martin is simply much too incompetent and unfit to have ministerial responsibility for what many would say is the most important cabinet portfolio there is. She bears full responsibility for so many unfit teachers and 'education' administrators being on the government's payroll. As we all know, a student robbed of a decent education during their most formative years, has little chance of succeeding at anything meaningful in life and usually becomes a terrible burden on society as a whole.

Good point!

Here's a good laugh for everyone. The US CDC website dedicated to Mpox has a heat map of outbreaks by country populated with data as of August 6, 2024 that shows the following:

Number of cases reported since 2022 in the **Bahamas** - 3 Deaths - 0

Number of cases reported since 2022 in **Jamaica** - 3 Deaths - 0

Number of cases reported since 2022 in **Cuba** - 8 Deaths - 0

Number of cases reported since 2022 in the Democratic Republic of **Congo** - 3,104 Deaths 10

Number of cases reported since 2022 in Canada - 1,557 Deaths - 0

Number of cases reported since 2022 in Mexico - 4,124 Deaths - 34

Number of cases reported since 2022 in Brazil - 11,212 Deaths - 16

Number of cases reported since 2022 in the **USA** - 33,435 Deaths - 60

No Mpox statistics are provided for Haiti, presumably because of no record keeping in that violent gangster run country.

Obviously the current US government is hoping to portray a full blown epidemic of Mpox underway all across the US within the next month or so in order to justify and stimulate early voting by absentee ballots in the upcoming presidential election in early November. LMAO

LOL. "A cursory google" as you call it is a sure fire way of filling one's mind with loads of misinformation.