Yes, Christie. How do you intend to pay for NHI? You are currently raiding the National Insurance Fund for BoB and other unworthy causes, VAT is here and was supposed to be used to pay down our debt but you are talking mess about using it for infrastructure, now NHI? You people cannot manage the public health care system as it is. As a further insult, you parliamentarians either take yourselves to the expensive private hospital on island or to physicians abroad. Yinna don't have to go through what the rest of us do and yet you want to force something like this on us? Why should more of my money be snatched from me to pay for something like that? We barely get what we need through PHA now, and i do not want you making choices for me on my health care! Why are you always looking for ways to sink this country? Scrap that man! Barely making it around here now! Get accountable with BAMSI and other of the country's raped and wasted funds and return all that largesse to the public treasury, make healthy foods affordable, promote exercise heavily and emphasize prevention and thus avoid this nine to ten figure disaster that you are determined to shove down our throats. I and so many others are so sick of the ineptness and lack of accountability your government is. Retire man and call an early election. We need a coalition of business geniuses to run this country, not PLP, FNM or DNA. This crew needs to go tho and now.

The casual way Roberts brushes MR. Moss aside says so much about what is wrong with this place. These people are so used to victimizing and intimidating people that think they are untouchable. Christie, please do something right for a change and put Roberts out to pasture. The chances of your party continuing to govern past the next elections are slim to none, if all the thinking Bahamians come out to vote. Help the party out and silence this troll.

I agree. While everyone is at the table, try to convince the GBPA to re-invest some of the money they collect off exorbitant business license fees and service charges and use them to re-invest in the development of Freeport rather than stashing it away in the Cayman Islands. I would also recommend they restructure their formula for calculating service charges as they are primarily the cause of the high cost of living in Freeport upon which they base this "formula" and often times services that should be performed are not actually done. Then a landowner is threatened with having their property repossessed for failure to pay these things. Lucayan Estates anyone? How can service charges be levied and you cannot build on the land, and they will not exchange it for an area that you can build in? Add to that a rescinding of their policy to LEASE commercial land to Bahamians rather than selling it to the citizens of the country. What do you think about that? You want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars improving once vacant land with a high class structure only to have these people come along and take it from you? Does that make any sense, especially with the many square miles of undeveloped land that is there? Allow alternative energy sources rather than threatening people when they try to save themselves from exorbitant power fees by using solar or other means after all, how can you police the power company when you yourself have a huge stake in the tens of millions of dollars they siphon off the masses? Exorbitant is not the word. Businesses, while de-crying VAT should also de-cry all these things. They are but the tip of the iceberg as to why Freeport doesn't prosper and continues to drag along to ghost town status. What a shame.

I really do not care what Roberts' opinion is. It is irrelevant.He is following American political rhetoric with this constant pushing of the "flip flopper" storyline. Be original please. Dr. Minnis is entitled to an opinion, and free to change his mind on issues when certain factors reveal themselves, but I am certain that when it comes down to the nitty gritty, he is more than capable of making an informed, firm decision. He could not have successfully practiced medicine all these years without that particular skill. This governing party, however, is pure smoke screens and mirrors. Roberts, use your loud voice on the issues of crime, making persons who owe long outstanding taxes pay them, ending the corruption that causes our country to stink at every level with nary a hope of moving forward, and stop wasting our time on useless crap like this.

Always with the familiar, oft used excuse. Can anyone regulate these people? (and don't say the GBPA either. No positive action will happen from that front.)

Unfortunately, the Grand Bahama Port Authority will not do so. What it did instead was link the business person's current status, in essence their being up to date with payments, to getting a business licence number in order to register for VAT and obtain a TIN number, as the government has demanded. Also, rather than educating their licensees on VAT and what it means in the city of Freeport, they chose instead to conduct sessions that attendees had to pay for. It was another means of siphoning money off the masses. They know, and the government knows, that this taxation has no place in Freeport because of the HCA; in fact, for the 150 to 200 million dollars in taxes collected from Freeport each year and absconded by the capital, very little is sent or done in return. The government figures "The Port will take care of it"(and they have the audacity to imply that Freeport "is always begging" when it asks for the assistance to which it is entitled as a part of the country and for the huge amounts of cash that the government relieves it of!); the port thinks "well the government is collecting, so they will take care of it" (in the meantime they are killing the populace with ridiculous business license and service charges fees and horrendous power bills; the power company by itself looms large over the sheer number of closed businesses on the island) and the result is the ghost town on Grand Bahama. The place is dismal and it is disgraceful what has been allowed to happen there. Greed and selfishness abound and there is no accountability at any level. Every time a government person gets on the media and brags about how well Freeport and Grand Bahama Island is doing, I really have to wonder which flicking planet they are on. They probably are doing well, and we are all still waiting for them to declare their assets. I would love to measure up how their fortunes have changed since the last election. How about some real investigative journalism here? In any case, I doubt any defense of the licensees will be forth coming. It should have been done long before now. You think this are rough now? The government is going to plant its big worthless backside on top of us and make life even more unbearable. The tsunami that is VAT is on our door step. May God help us all.

With all the threats you people were issuing, did you expect anything different minister? No one is in a rush to hasten the demise of our country. These businesses certainly aren't. No where in the Caribbean where this garbage was forced on the citizenry has the very awful tax been successful. All those countries are sinking and even with knowing this, you forced this on us. Garbage and filth. Collect the taxes you all are already due and stop giving your friends family sweetheart and nation of offspring passes that none of the rest of us get. Better educate the populace and cut the cabinet and civil service. We are being made to suffer further for foolishness done by government over the last forty plus years, the worst being the administrations of 2002-2007 and currently. People can barely afford to live in this ridiculously expensive place now and you are going to further the pain by putting this on us? Early election please and I hope only informed voters are allowed to cast votes. Some of the people who actually do and are bussed in to vote are a scary lot; they control all our future and destinies and have no clue as to the state of the nation, what is going on in the country and the consequences of voting in exchange for a favor. Disgraceful and horrific.

Mr. Smith, please take all that passion and energy and use it to fight the GBPA on Grand Bahamians' behalf. They have abused the people there for numerous years and have more than earned returns on their initial investment. To just willy nilly charge fees upon fees for things not being done (see Lucayan Estates), business licenses and just allowing the power company to literally leave people in darkness and shut down businesses due to those outrageous bills while using duty free fuel is just unacceptable. While they live a life of luxury, the populace suffers as they are just a means to feed that high end life style. That needs to be your focus. Help Freeport to grow the way that it is supposed to. You cannot justify these illegal people breaking the laws of the land nor agree to the disintegration of our culture and sovereignty due to our being out-bred by these persons from Hispaniola. They have their own country that they can do that in.

"Penalties for failing to register for VAT, said bccec ceo Edison Sumner, include “fines and possible imprisonment according to the legislation. Fines could be as high as $250,000 in monetary fines and it could carry prison terms for those not compliant with new registration, he added." Please remind us of what the penalties are for MPs for failure to disclose assets/financials? For insider trading? For squandering the public purse?

This lady has a problem with dictatorship. The only monsters created here are the lack of enforcement of existing immigration laws after all these years, the conscienceless selling of status documents by persons in positions to provide them, the failure to ensure that persons born to illegal immigrants in this country be duly registered as Haitian citizens before they check out of the public hospitals ( I have always thought the Haitian ambassador should have an outlying office at PMH and RMH for this purpose, even before mother and child get to the Registrar General's office to register the birth), and the incorrect interpretation these people have of our Bahamian constitution. There is no birthright citizenship in the bahamas. Our laws clearly state who is entitled to this honour. These persons, born of illegals, are entitled to apply; apply, for consideration, not to automatically receive citizenship. To do otherwise would destroy our sovereignty and entire culture, which in fact their very presence already has. How can you come into another man's land and attempt to dictate like this? Return to Hispaniola and try that. Since this woman (reportedly) is a naturalized Bahamian citizen, she should do her best to promote the improvement of THIS country, rather than encourage the completion of its transformation into a Haitian outpost, which is what this particular class of immigrants is attempting to achieve.