The failure of a broad swath of the Bahamian citizenry to pay their real property taxes is more than a scandal, it is a blight on the nation's financial stability. That said, no reasonable person can deny that this situation is one of long standing, going back to the very outset of national Independence. To provide a chance for relief, via some reduction for properties valued at the lower end of the spectrum, in order to reorder the system, makes a world of sense. What makes no sense is to permit the wealthy, and this includes legions of current and former governmental officials, to escape one dime of the taxes including penalties they owe and have owned for years. There needs to be a bill passed that requires the government to foreclose and sell properties that have unpaid real property tax bills and to use the proceeds to retire the obligation. This proposed relief bill if limited to properties below $250,000 in appraised value would not be offensive. If fairness requires, provide some future relief to such lower value properties in the form of a discount. If such a law were passed, stand back and watch the Fat Cats scramble to pay up. They hold properties worth billions and they are not going to lose them. Further with a firm eye on past failure to collect, this proposal will bring few of those large scale miscreants to the table.

And Fred has such a record of honesty and personal integrity that any charge he makes must be taken seriously.....excuse me I'm getting sick.

All the king's horses and all the king's men have singularly failed in their efforts to bring this disease under control. A tiny few island nations with extremely disciplined populations have effectively addressed the spread of this virus. The rest of the world would have been far better served to have assisted their elderly in isolating, and to have gone on with business as usual. The WHO and CDC efforts have proved singularly ineffectual in doing anything but adding monstrous economic pain to the scourge.

Fred the impotent, dithers on.

Humans have the choice to rob, steal, murder and cheat, does that mean that a civilized government should sanction those activities? Anyone who studies the problem knows that many gamblers are addicted, and impose serious damage and suffering on their families and the greater society. It is a fiction that what they do hurts no one but themselves.

Should announce they'd put some virus on that graftin' cash and Brave et al would starve.

I wonder why these people are being phased out. Gee, read editorial on Peter Nygard and Bahamian shame in today's paper. Still wonder?

This suggestion may be the dumbest in a long line of dumb ideas resulting from the Dorian disaster. This catastrophic event or "hurricane" coverage is all passed on to reinsurance risk and priced by the reinsurance market, and the "pool" is not limited to one country or one island in one country. More Bahamians buying this coverage will not move the premium cost needle one whit. The cost of this coverage is ludicrous, and the deductible provisions are such that short of total devastation, which is a once in 200 year event on some islands, not even that on all, the insured suffering substantial damage, recovers zero. Cost is prohibitive and making it mandatory would bankrupt the populace. This is nothing but a crass effort to put lots of cash in a few local insurance brokers' pockets.

No one needed to bamboozle anyone. This is all about standing with "my brother" against "the man". Sadly a great swath of the electorate has yet to realize that "they" are "the man" and that continuation of the fiction of "the man" is all that keeps the PLP in business.

Total nonsense on steroids.