Yes, you are soooo right!! The foreigners are a huuuuge problem. They are all queuing up to swamp a market of 300,000 people with an average wage of $21,000, as opposed to staying in US or Canada, with a combined market of 400 million and twice the income. How is it that Minnis can't see that? It is obvious! Must be the bad Bahamian education system. He never learnt the maths.

While you are absolutely right that we have not "clearly articulated a comprehensive value proposition" and that we must do so, you are plain wrong about "most jurisdictions assessing tax based on citizenship". The only one that does that is the USA. The only one.
Already in the past few years you are seeing dozens of software developers from the EU coming here to live and avoid the high taxes at home. Many more will follow. Not because of this Act, but it will help, at the margins.

There are several reasons: English language, English law, proximity to US, low tax, decent private schooling.

But it will have a marginal benefit for the economy. A total of 200-300 people will come here and generate a maximum total of 500-1000 jobs locally.
I can see freelance software developers and other such "lone-wolf" operations. But overall you are right: nothing that will generate the numbers and quality of jobs this country needs. It is a small start. That is all.

I wish I knew. But I will tell what I think it is: Fear.
Fear of discovering just how small and irrelevant we are. How the modern world has passed us by, how we squandered the 50yrs since Independence. How we are incapable of governing ourselves well.
Fear of reality.
We suspect it...even know it in the depth of our hearts. But we do not want it proven beyond all doubt. And some "foreigner" might actually open our eyes and shatter our illusions.

The funniest thing is reading these comments. You guys have somehow managed to convince yourselves that there are hundreds of thousands of "foreigners" just waiting for this Bill to pass to come to the Bahamas and set up shop.

I wish.

Let me break it to you gently: there aren't.

At most this will affect a hundred people or so per year. At most. I would wager far less.

I agree with you. The Government should have educated the people. But it did not. Will it start now? Of course not. Is this now supposed to fall on the small business? Just laughable.
Neither Google nor Microsoft are going to come here. The best you can hope for is a 4-5 person business requiring a simple room as an office. No time or finances to train anyone. That is the reality of the situation. Everything else is pie in the sky and an excuse to do nothing. I wish it could be different, but it is what it is. No serious player is EVER going to come here because he can go to the USA. We are in the position we are in and we have to make do with the crumbs. Better crumbs than nothing, in my opinion.

Let me explain to you how the free market works. Because after almost 50 years of pseudo-socialism and protectionism, no one here understands a thing about it any more. And I mean this in the nicest possible way.

The idea that some small company is going to train Bahamians (or anyone else) to do some job in the fields mentioned above (wealth management, nanotechnology, software, etc...) is laughable. Small companies do not have the time or resources to do that. We are not talking about chambermaids here, where all you have to show them is how to use a broom. That is not their job in any case. It is YOUR job to educate yourself and to train yourself through on the job experience.

What they will do is offer you a job and a salary provided you have done the above. So you will have a CHANCE, now you have none. Which do you prefer?

The onus is on YOU, the individual to make yourself employable, not on some small company to furnish you with the skills to become so.

Our choice as a country is simple: stay as we are, with GDP growth at 0%, with an ever increasing knowledge gap and slowly go the way of Haiti.

Or open up, allow tens of thousands of expatriates to come here for the climate and low tax regime, in the hope that they will pay the taxes that Bahamians cannot (as they cannot generate the wealth), which are needed to repay our massive debt. They will buy houses, cars, employ maids and gardeners and through their businesses some tiny percentage of the population, which actually understands the free market, will apply for relevant online courses, learn the skills needed and get a good job. But the hope that this will be a massive employment opportunity for Bahamians is plain silly.

But anything is better than the status quo.

Credit bureaux are private companies all over the world. There is absolutely no reason why the government should have anything to do with it. You are quite right in stating that they are incapable of organizing a piss up in a brewery.

As always, look for who benefits financially. Who does the gardening? Haitians. Who digs up the roads? Haitians. Who picks up the garbage? Haitians. Etc, etc, etc.
Who owns all those businesses? Bahamians. And they have a name and surname and you know them all well and they could all fit around one table in the PM's office.
Enough said.

The IMF knows nothing.

We have been doing that for years at BoB. Join the PLP, put up no collateral, get as much money as you like. That turned out well.