May 2, 2014

Dear Sir,

I just don’t get it. Are there this many people in Bermuda who simply do not understand the job situation and think that if they march and stamp their collective feet, that somehow jobs will appear from nowhere? For the last 10 years of their reign, the PLP did everything they could to scare employers and tourists away from Bermuda. Corruption, incompetence and a hatred of anyone not Bermudian resulted in massive losses of jobs and a collapse of the Bermuda economy. It had very little to do with that favourite excuse of the PLP, the collapse of the Global Economy — what happened in Bermuda happened because of the PLP.

You cannot snap your fingers and create jobs overnight and you cannot create jobs with emotional ideas that do not work. In the RG on Friday there were pictures of a placard carried by one marcher ... on the placard were written two ideas: increase taxes on high earners and wealthy land owners and also a plea to increase the minimum wage. The majority of “high earners” are not Bermudian and will simply go somewhere else; I assume wealthy land owners means owners of high valued real estate and again either many of them are non- Bermudian and if they are Bermudian they’re probably land rich and cash poor; and even if there was a minimum wage to be increased (there isn’t, I don’t think) even MORE businesses would go under.

This naiveties and lack of understanding of what makes an economy tick is half the problem. If the PLP and the BIU and the whatever this new group is called really want to understand the problem they should talk to two people ... Paula Cox and Craig Simmons, who is an economist at the college. Paula because she can tell you what happened when she raised taxes (and if she can’t or won’t just ask her brother Jeremy) and the economist because he understands and people could learn from him.

OK maybe you have a political issue with the OBA but they do know what to do to turn this economy around. They are definitely not as smart at politics as the PLP and they surely have a major problem communicating with the people. But do all those marchers and all those fanatics calling into certain talk shows really want to continue to be unemployed and reliant on the PLP to solve a problem that they created and have no idea how to solve.

It is very useful to have the democratic right to march and express yourself ... but really smart people use their eyes and ears in addition to the mouth.

Sincerely

Reality Check