Yes, of course, there are many ways to nickle and dime the taxpayer. Technically speaking, NIB is a roundabout form of "income tax" as well.

I have actually lived and worked abroad before coming back, and I remember vividly how excited I was with my first job's stated salary when signing the employment contract, and then being completely disappointed reading my first pay slip. It is the biggest reason I rail so hard against the numerous taxes that these governments want to impose, and against how hard they piss the money away once it is in their hands. It is a vicious cycle of piss money away, whine that we need more taxes, piss that money away, repeat. We are so blessed not to pay income tax, not pay RPT on the Family Islands as a Bahamian, and so much more. It is something that we should truly be trying to preserve for our children.

My main point was that we cannot expect our society to be any different if our people listen to nothing but that garbage. Dancehall or (c)rap music always involves one (at the least) of the following themes :

a.) Selling drugs
b.) Killing someone because they stepped on my shoes or are wearing the wrong coloured shirt
c.) Having sex with a million different women, spreading STDs everywhere, bringing a bunch of unwanted children into the world, and then abandoning them

I have never once heard a song about :

a.) Getting a good job
b.) Staying married to one woman and raising kids in a stable home
c.) Being an upstanding citizen and caring for the local community

Traditional reggae I don't mind as much because there are some good songs that promote virtuous living, but dancehall and (c)rap music promote nothing but poison. There is a saying in the software development industry that applies well here, "garbage in, garbage out". When our young people have their heads filled with nothing but this nonsense, can we really be shocked that they turn out the way that they do? I'm not, and I only expect it to get worse based off of what I hear/see.

The Biblical part of your post is another discussion, but I reiterate that telling a story/preserving a historical record is a different matter than glorifying certain behaviour. I am not sure what your particular issue with Solomon is? Maybe because of the situation surrounding David and Bathsheeba? If so, remember that Solomon found favour in the eyes of God because he asked for wisdom, and not for wealth, the death of his enemies, etc. The situation regarding Abraham and Isaac requires the context that Isaac was a miracle child that God had given Abraham in old age, and it was the fact that Abraham was not going to withhold even his miracle son from God that was considered praiseworthy. Human sacrifice is condemned in nothing but the strongest of terms in the Deuteronomic law, especially sacrifice of children to Moloch as was the custom of pagan areas in that region at the time. It is given as a key reason that the Canaanites were to be driven out of the Holy Land. Regarding Cain, we have no idea that God did not create other people in addition to Adam and Eve. Scripture certainly doesn't rule it out, and much of the primeval world is left open to different interpretation. Not much can really be defined with any certainty about that time period. I honestly don't have any sympathy for adulterers either, especially not in this day and age where the court rewards them with alimony and child support.

How is having the Ministry of Health make these kinds of decisions constitutionally acceptable?

The Bahamas is overpopulated, there are not enough jobs to go around for everyone. The mass migration of Bahamians to Canada (which has much easier immigration procedures than the US) is a natural vent for this problem, albeit not a big enough one. There are simply not enough jobs here, so it would be beneficial to find a way to make it easier for Bahamians to find overseas work.

Salaries are indeed lower here than in the US, but something to consider is that we don't pay income tax here. What you see listed as your salary in the US or Canada is not what you are going to get paid. The government will take their cut, and depending on where you live/how much you make, it can range from anywhere to 15% - 30% for most people.

At the end of the day, both employees and employers have to work together to find common ground for everyone. Raise the wages on small businesses and watch them shut down while the few workers they do employ end up on the backs of the government (ie. taxpayer). Rather than talking about wages, developing sustainable industries should be the topic. I am sorry, it is ridiculous to expect to pay someone close to 700 a week for an unskilled service job. The problem is that there is a very limited supply of skilled/semi-skilled positions in this country, and no government has focused on creating more. Cleaning rooms and bartending are not skilled professions that can justify paying someone thousands of dollars every month, you can literally pick people off of the street and have them perform those tasks. Shut the businesses down and see how much worse things get for you with everyone on the government dole.

Both the PLP and FNM are malignant tumors doing their best to kill off the Bahamas. At the end of the day, you cannot assign all the blame to them though considering that the Bahamian electorate never pulls their collective head out of their ass to at least vote for someone different. There really is nothing left to lose at this point, you know what you are going to get with either set of goons, so at least try someone new for a change.

Any right thinking Bahamian should be praying that the next storm to pass our way blows both the FNM and PLP so far out to sea that they cannot do any further harm to this country. I am so sick of these buffoons talking bullshit about we need more taxes while continually pissing away the money that we give them. There is a special place in the lower circles of Hell reserved for Bahamian politicians and their cronies who are good for nothing but leeching off of the hard work of others.

The Old Testament does not glorify anything that you listed, it merely recounts such incidences from a historical perspective.

We are just shy of the top ten in both murders and rapes per capita worldwide, have a country full of negligent "parents" (using that term loosely) that don't raise their children and leave the gangs to do so, and have to have burglar bars on windows and run red lights in the wee hours of the night lest we get robbed (if we live in Nassau, at least).

I fully agree with Mr. Evans, the shitty dancehall and (c)rap music polluting our young people's minds should be completely outlawed, it has produced (and does not produce) any positive for our society.

> 21st Century’s first war in 2008

Ummm, the US invaded Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) before the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. There was also this guy called Napoleon who invaded Russia before Hitler as well. I would say that the Russian desire to buffer their border is well founded.

NATO made a massive mistake in not courting the Russians during the 90s. Had the cards been dealt differently, they could have been a useful partner in containing Chinese expansionism in the 21st century. The Chinese have territorial ambitions of their own on Russian lands that could have been exploited had NATO not pushed Russia away by bringing in so many former Soviet republics. It was a lost opportunity that the West is coming to regret these days.

> Caribbean Marshall Plan

Lol. The US invested billions into post-war Western Europe purely to thwart the spread of communism through the lands destroyed in the closing stages of the Second World War. There was an actual incentive to invest that kind of money, plus nations like West Germany and France had enough industrial experience and infrastructure to put the money to good use and bring a return. Why would the US, in the midst of their own economic issues with inflation, piss away money on some Caribbean backwater countries? To keep China out, maybe, but they could always Grenada a country that got too friendly with them if it came to that. It is not like they would ever get a return on their investment either, it would go straight into the pockets of corrupt politicians and we would continue to hear about "reparations" for another 100 years. See Haiti for an example of how pouring money into a problem doesn't always make it go away.

Do these talking heads mean pre-Dorian "pre-COVID" or post-Dorian "pre-COVID"? Having your #2 & #3 revenue producers wiped out is a factor that needs to be mentioned when giving these kinds of assessments.

The FNM is in a worse position than the PLP was in the aftermath of their 2017 spanking. The PLP had a chance to shed the unpopularity of the 2012-17 Christie administration because Perry got sent home by his constituents, he had no platform to continue to drag the party down with rash statements. The FNM made a big mistake in not forcing Minnis to resign his Killarney seat in the aftermath of the September spanking. They would have lost it in the by-election, but it is not like one seat was going to make a difference in a 32-7 House of Assembly. It would have went red again at the next election purely due to demographics, and it would spared the party of having to deal with Minnis continually hogging up the public spotlight with these kinds of statements. Minnis is just as unpopular as Christie was in 2017, except that he is not giving anyone a chance to forget about him.