You are right about Bahamian workers being underpaid. I myself, worked construction while going to a foreign university (a student visa allowed one to work up to 24 hours per week). I showed up at 6:00 AM at a labour exchange and got a job within half an hour. The contractors paid us the same as the union members to avoid trouble with the unions. It was backbreaking work, but it paid about triple what the minimum wage was. I couldn't believe the money that I was making. I was making significantly more money at 24 hours a week than my relatives here with full time jobs.

The issues here are two-fold. The first is that Haitian labour will always work for cheaper wages, and second the minimum wage is so 1970's. How can you not hire a worker who has a better work ethic, and works for less out of personal desperation? As a result, Bahamians can't compete for unskilled jobs, which is all they can do.

There is a tougher problem. The domestic minimum wage is about $150 a week. The civil service minimum wage is just a bit over $11,000 per year or less than a thousand a month. In this day and age, with the cost of living in the Bahamas, the minimum wage of less than $10,000 a year is untenable. However, as pointed out earlier, in economics, one can valuate the work output of human capital with a multiplier based on economic worth. For example, if I pay someone to create goods or a service for me to sell, generally the value multiplier is twofold. In other words, if I can't sell it for double of what it cost me, I'm not making money -- when you factor in the cost of doing business, fees, accountants, my salary, etc. So if the person is being paid $10 for an hours worth of work, and I can't sell whatever they for $20, then that person is not worth the $10 that I paid. The numbers and value multipliers may be off, but you get the idea.

There are only so many hamburgers that Wendy's can sell, or so many pizzas that you can get at Marcos (didn't mean to plug the Greek family fast food tycoons, but I like their stuff -- although the hamburgers at Jimmy's aint bad). So if it costs more to make the maximum amount of hamburger or pizzas that they can sell in a day, then the economic value of the employees is not worth what they are paying them.

And because our economy is so monolithic and screwed up, I can get away with paying people their economic worth, which is low, and charge a heck of a lot more that the product is worth. This is true of the luxury homes. If you built the same home on Yamacraw Road as you did in Old Fort Bay or Lyford Cay, the cost to the buyer would be triple, the profits are triple, and yet the workers are paid the same.

If we did have a robust economy, and the demand for workers outstripped the supply, then there could be decent wages. But with a systemic structural unemployment rate of 13-15%, and a stalled GDP growth, that will never happen. The economy is more likely to implode.

Same as when Bernadette Christie collected 6 figures as a consultant to a shipping firm here. The shipping firm said that she did nothing, but collect the money and appear at the launch ceremony for a ship.

It's Adam that is autistic.

From an economics point of view, it is quite a conundrum. When I am at the supermarket, I take a look in the baskets to see what the people are buying. Working mothers with young children buy snacks of those small bags of chips, or inexpensive fruit snacks laced with sugar. Not only are these empty calories, but they contribute to obesity. Even if the parents knew about nutrition and healthy eating, the average wage in the Bahamas is not enough to eat well, unless a family is a two-income family with both partners with good jobs.

The minimum wage is not enough to live on, with the high food prices due to having all foodstuffs imported. Most service workers are not making much more than the minimum wage, and it is a poverty wage.

The reason it is an economics problem, is that due to the productivity of the Bahamian worker, they really can't be paid more. Unfortunately the human capital available, doesn't have a high enough intrinsic worth -- being virtually illiterate in language and math skills. And the majority of the cadre of workers fit into this category.

The survival foods for low-income people include the pastas and carbohydrates and that in turn leads to obesity, diabetes, low productivity due to the carb lethargy. It is a vicious circle, and I for one, do not see any answers that would quickly ameliorate the problem. It's an artifact of our economy, our society and our educational system.

You have shown your true colours. Not Black enough for you because I'm educated and have a good job? Or I'm not Black enough to be gullible to believe what the PLP tells me to believe. Or to participate in the revisionist lies of the PLP on how the natives were liberated under Black Judas? Or maybe next you will call me Hyshun because of my skin pigmentation? Lowest of the low -- racist -- and you pretend to follow Christianity as well? My cousin Paul, whom you once mentioned, and was a PLP stalwart, would say that you were suffering from n**geritis. You are part of the problem that caused this beautiful country to go to pot.

What sophistry! Because I have a tertiary education, I owe it all to Swindling, because I am of a pigmented persuasion in terms of skin colour? Are you saying that if we were still under British rule, like say the Cayman Islands, then we would still be repressed and kept as slaves? You PLPs are still slaves and have the slave mentality, as demonstrated by Fweddie. As a matter of fact, you act like a more female version of Fweddie, except Fweddie is not as obfuscated with cryptic loquaciousness, and is a lot more understandable.

The Caymanis aren't held back and they never got independence. They have a higher standard of living than we do -- comparable to Switzerland, so says the UN Human Development Index. Us -- we live in a war zone full of illiterate, unenlightened people.

Are you saying that I owe my professional career to a dubious Bahamian (a Pendalane name origin, who may not have not even been born in the Bahamas, a Jamaican of Hatian origin who raped our patrimony by selling out to the Medellin cartels)? What bosh! What BS! We do read the papers, and know of the value of an education, and stuff of enlightenment beyond this parochial piece of limestone, and how Loftus Roker made a mockery of Bahamian education. I toiled by sweat of my own brow and the labours of my back to save money for my foreign education. I owe nothing to Black Judas Pindling. He owes us the millions that his family has locked away in Swiss and Caymani banks.

If there is a hell, you will rot and burn in it, for your lies are not the lies of ignorance, but rather the slick lies greased by the filthy lucre of the criminal organisation that you defend.

Question: Tal, why are the yellows so corrupt.
Tal Answer: The reds were a lil corrupt too.

Question: Tal, why can't the yellows tell the truth.
Tal Answer: The reds told lies sometimes too.

Question: Tal, why is it dark at night?
Tal Answer: It was dark at night when the reds were in power as well.

This is pure comedy. Cannot stay on topic without bringing up the FNM. But the most hilarious phrase is Swindling's long and difficult journey to remake the Bahamas. Look around. He sure remade it all right. We were the most civilised, educated, literate and law-abiding people in the Caribbean Basin. And now, we have truth deniers like you, and we shoot people while they are buying breakfast, and ... oh by the way... we have sold ourselves to the Chinese, who are racist against Blacks. Yes, thank God for the piss yellow. I am voting for them for the first time (even though my cousin was AG for them), because the only way to hurry and end this misery, is to give them full reign to blow this country apart completely, so that even the stupidest PLP partisans, will revile their party, as long as there is a Bahamas on this earth.

All that Brad knows how to do, is smear people. Not a nice individual at all, and quite a primitive, unenlightened specimen. Belongs in a cage.

Wow, Fweddie is now Christie's puppetmaster. Christie moves his lips and Fweddie does the talking.

Someone should point out to these bozos, that respect is earned in inches and lost in yards. But more bluntly, respect is earned. According to the fallacious argument of these country-wreckers, if Adolf Hitler ran the Bahamas, we should respect him.

The office of Prime Minister is like a mantle or a cape. It confers the power on a person, but if that person is just a pile of human excrement, then it doesn't reserve respect. It is just an idiot who got himself elected.

Respect needs something to land on -- either integrity or patriotism or both. All of that is lacking from both Fweddy and Crisco-Butt.

Old Cauliflower-ears, Allyson, is just lying trying to cover up her corruption. She is more unacquainted with the truth than Fweddie the MOFA. As for Baltron Bethel sending the email outlining strategy to Baha Mar by accident, Baltron was senile when he was running the Hotel Corporation. Christie's head valves are damaged, and Brave is the puppetmaster. We live with a Kafkaesque, corrupt kleptocracy, and nobody cares, or the majority of Bahamians are too dumb to understand.