“So weep ye ancients who deplore that Old Bermuda is no more”

Dear Sir,

Bermuda is now the home of the wealthy and the poor. The Bermuda of the Eighties and Nineties is no more. There was in the past, a thriving middle class which paid its taxes, schooled its children, prepared for old age, and left an inheritance for its offspring. That is no more!

Mary Hardworker is a typical example of the middle class. She was a steady, dependable employee for some 52 years. She purchased a house, accumulated a nest egg of some $250,000, and enjoyed a small pension when she retired. Now at the ripe old age of 85, she is incapable of looking after herself and has been in a seniors home for five years. Her funds are rapidly being depleted. The Government says she is not destitute, as she has funds left in her account, but soon those funds will be wiped out.

Mary has a problem and so does Bermuda! Who can afford $6,000 to $12,000 a month for healthcare? Only the very rich! How many retirees have planned like Mary Hardworker, our middle-class poster child?

The country’s leaders — political and business — have sucked the life blood out of the middle class, and these leaders include those in the medical profession. They have nickel-and-dimed the middle class to death. The banks have cut the interest paid to savers such as Mary Hardworker to almost zero, while increasing their lending rate to borrowers — and levelling sets of fees on them “to increase shareholder equity”.

Businesses and investors get tremendous government incentives and tax breaks, while the middle class and poor receive another $10 on their monthly pensions.

Bermuda, once an island of churches and bars, is now fast becoming a land of clinics, which appears to be the new cash cow of doctors and investors.

The cost of groceries, medicines, doctors’ visits, etc, is astronomical. Repairs for everything, from plumbing to mechanical, are priced as if we are dealing with doctors and the legal profession. Imagine $85 to $100 an hour for a plumber, electrician or landscapers who only “mow, blow and go”.

Supposed protectors of the poor and middle class, like the Regulatory Authority, genuflect to the electricity and power suppliers. Tom, Dick and Harry receive concessions. Not so with Mary Hardworker.

Grocery stores cynically ask the shopper, if they wish to “round up” and give the difference to charity, while they increase their prices and the grocery packers who used to get the “round-up” look at you, hoping for the change or a gratuity for packing the groceries. There is never an option to “round down”.

A leader once stated that “money does not grow on trees”. He was absolutely correct. In the past, money used to grow on the “middle class”, but that class no longer exists. Meanwhile, as the Good Book points out, “the poor shall never cease out of the land”. (Deuteronomy 15:11)

And so, while we celebrate how Bermuda is now at the top of the world chart of the most expensive places to live on Earth, and while our government grants massive concessions to businesses and investors, let us mourn the demise of a once-thriving island — which is being sold off piece by piece, and which is no longer sustained by a vibrant, overtaxed and now deceased middle class.

CLEVELYN A.J. CRICHLOW

Paget