Comment history

whogothere says...

Problem with that fix is one - equivalent to pushing a elephant up hill while dragging a rhinoceros behind you. Without efficiency in government you breed corruption. Ultimately government has to 'work' then the need to 'grease the wheels' is less likely...Creating income tax in a renown tax haven is a disaster too... FDI investment will capitulate... You have to face facts - Bahamas is a place in the sun for shady people... That said there is no reason why we can't develop alternative income streams without alienating existing cash flow..

whogothere says...

The point is that best practice or not, usually it's not accompanied by a vat reduction in the face of overwhelming government debt...

A 2% discount on all of economy is not balanced by a 10% VAT on bread basket items that have almost no value added...Imagine if you were running restaurant and you said hey let's cut the price on all menu items but start charging for the paper napkins...you can bet you'll lose money....

whogothere says...

"People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots, according to new research."

oh...

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10…

whogothere says...

Not the Pandemic - government policies! And for what? How many lives saved? How many infections stopped? Please pay attention plp and don't repeat the mistake..

whogothere says...

RIght now only thing mentioned are Breadbasket foods (low cost) and medicines (higher-ish cost) but both low margin - value added taxed works on the premise that value that is added is taxed - the lower the margin the lower the value added...if breadbasket items are now sold at break even or at a lost because price controls literally nothing gets added to value and so no tax revenue gained even though you are now charging 10% vat on them...meanwhile your high margin items enjoy a 2% discount. The equation does not balance...

whogothere says...

PS/meanwhile "price control" my black ass - ha - you can bet that every store will creep those prices up... Big business will get to saving to profit and the average Bahamian will barely the difference..or more likely suffer because of it.. Just increase your nurses and teachers salaries by 5% - it will probably cost you less and the country will be better off because of it..

whogothere says...

Someone help me make sense of this - food store peeps, accountants etc...let's take milk...It's what, maybe an average of $4 something per litre right? Milk in the USA landed wholesale is maybe $3.5 per litre?

Whatever it is I'm just going to take those to figures for argument sake...that means the taxable value added to milk (seeing as we don't produce and almost all milk is imported) is maybe 50 cents - right? so multiplying by 0.1 our government will start to net 5 cents on every litre of milk. Let's say if 350k Bahamians buy 2 litres of milk per week. Thats 36.4 million litres per year, so yay government gets make an additional 1.8 Million per year - wonderful take that IMF!!

But on the flip side lets take Atlantis with 3800 rooms, average nightly rate of maybe 450 (for argument sake) and maybe a annual 60% occupancy their taxable income is going to be around 374 Million and with a 2% drop in vat tax they stand to pay the government around 7 million less than they would before reductions... thats one business (and just the rooms - never mind the booze and food sales)... their reduction in payment dwarfs essentially (probably) the entire amount gained from taxation of the entire residential consumption of Milk in The Bahamas (warranted I'm using made up numbers but I think they're within the realm of reason - but let me know if not)...!?

Am I computing this right? Cuz if a lay bird like myself is getting that this don't make a damned bit of sense on my home calculator - either I'm very wrong with my starting assumptions or something is very wrong with this decision...

whogothere says...

Oh i forgot, in case I'm not clear - I'm by no means putting all my chips in on IVM as the miracle cure - quite the contrary...but there is room for 'good' research to be done - unfortunately the political landscape of that potential research is divisive and explosive which has caused supreme bias on both sides of the debate. The Church of the Vaccine will not stand for alternatives...And the clergy of the Anti vax will embrace and glorify any and alll alternatives... either way objective science is sacrificed on both alters...

whogothere says...

Bobbser. bud. you're getting lost in the weeds -they provide the source documents (come on buddy you re a smart guy) but I guess it's possible don't you know how to actually use the site I posted - you're clicking on "discussion tab"(oops) - which does go to their blah blah blah but ignore their meta analysis - who gives a whiff about that...simply hold the mouse over the cited study and you will be given several options (bear mind thats my link not the one you shared) - simply click on the "source field" and you'll get to the original paper it's not that hard...and from there you can evaluate the data yourself - it's hit or miss but again even if there is some success it seems to be systematically ignored because the threat to vaccination program...and well thats just not good science or journalism..

here I'v collected a few you (some crap some not so much) keep an open mind bobbsers it suits you better ;) :

https://ejmo.org/10.14744/ejmo.2021.162…

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.117…

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a…

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ecli…

https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/jp…

https://www.dovepress.com/clinical-bioc…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl…

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a…

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/f…

https://www.dovepress.com/clinical-bioc…

PS have a good weekend? too - happy reading ;)

whogothere says...

Bobby you (once again as usual) missed the point I m not interested in this website’s meta-analysis - that irrelevant - it’s the compendium of links to the studies that generally show positive outcomes from IVMs application…which you so asked for and so received - and as I said even if IVM is 10% effective (data is still coming in as it is with vaccines) then yeah alot of lives would be saved - remember they mandated masks for less ;)