Mark Espat says there is no budget, only taxes
Albert Area Representative and Deputy Party leader for the PUP, Mark Espat, did not take the blame for the country’s financial woes lightly. He felt that all of Saldivar’s posturing was in hopes of getting elevated to a powerful portfolio after a cabinet reshuffle, which is expected after village council elections in June. But on the budget, Espat reiterated several times that he thought that it was merely a debate on taxes and not on infrastructural projects that come along with a fiscal plan.
Mark Espat, Deputy Leader, PUP
“The member for Belmopan insists from time to time—it seems he cannot help himself—in trying to call me out. Well let me tell him once and for all, you have neither the physical nor mental agility. We’ll the pm has set a time table, the Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, has said in June he will make his changes and so we don’t have to quarrel Mr. Speaker, we’ll see in June how mentally agile the prime minister considers you to be. It’s just a question of weeks. Perhaps it is a misnomer for us to call this a debate on the appropriations bill. It would be more accurate it we would have termed this as a debate on a tax bill because that is what this is. This is not a budget bill this is a tax bill. Mr. Speaker, when you look at the numbers, this government is proposing to collect from this year to next year an additional one hundred and ten million dollars. I am not making that up Mr. Speaker; the one hundred and ten million dollars is a real figure. If the members on the other side, if the social partners, if the unions, if those here in the gallery today, if they examine the budget book and the numbers coming out of the government, nobody can get up from the other side and say that they are not proposing to collect from this year to next year a hundred and ten million dollars more next year than this year. Of that hundred and ten million dollars more, Mr. Speaker, sixty million dollars will come from brand new taxes, fresh taxes, the center piece of which is a twenty-five percent increase as the leader of the opposition said, a twenty-five percent increase in the GST, which will affect every man woman and child in this country. This is the Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, in that January twenty-fifth interview: “I will try to get a handle almost immediately on what the hell is going on in the oil industry in our country. I don’t think that anybody is satisfied with where it is at. I don’t want to sound as though I am sending any signal of war but I just know that the whole situation needs to be looked at urgently”. And he goes on in his manifesto to commit shares in a national oil company to the Belizean people, which I will not call him out for now because he is only at month twenty-six and we still have twenty-four months. But I have to mention it because one would have expected that by now there would be more progress. But he did say that he wanted to find out what the hell was going on in the oil industry. That was January of 2008. Mr. Speaker, I must confess, when we speak about this alternative to the taxes that they have proposed, I must confess that I misled the House. When I stood here in July of 2008 and when I said that all we were getting from every dollar of oil that was exported was twenty-two or twenty-three cents. I misled the House and I am compelled to correct myself now. We are not even getting twenty-two or twenty-three cents, we are getting eighteen cents out of every dollar. I am opposed to this budget because it is a stew that wasn’t cooked up here, it was cooked up in Washington and it is being all too willingly served to the people of Belize. I oppose this budget Mister Speaker.”
Mark Espat is the only politician with a competent brain and a good heart in Belize. The current Leader of the Opposition has surrounded himself with mostly ill-reputed people, especially from Cayo and Corozal. Mark Espat all the way!
Does the name-calling and boasting really achieve anything? Oh sure, you may say that we are naive and that this boasting and bashing is all part of the parliamentary way of communicating, its all politics, but if my memory serves me right and i think it does, all the politicians we remember as being good, genuinely good, never began a statement by saying you are have neither the physical nor mental agility to handle me? He sounds like that song out of the 90’s “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for this podium, too sexy for parliament”. I’m tired of it. Get over it.
My comments are based on Mark’s impressive political trajectory, not on the show that is displayed at the National Assembly. Everyone there talks the talk; but only Mark Espat walks the walk. Check it. It’s as simple as that. This is no intended campaign for him; it’s just my objective observation.