Golding says PNP's budget proposals would cost $23B

The proposals put forward by the parliamentary Opposition during the just-concluded Budget Debate would cost approximately $23 billion, Opposition Leader and President of the People’s National Party (PNP) Mark Golding has asserted.

According to Golding, this is would be the equivalent to 1.8 per cent of the $1.27 trillion budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on April 1.

He was pushing back at an assertion by Finance Minister Fayval Williams in Parliament on Tuesday that the proposals posited by the Opposition or what she called the PNP’s “implied budget” would cost approximately $48.8 billion.

However, Golding and other PNP officials dismissed the claim by Williams as misleading and “political gimmickry”.

PNP spokesman on education Senator Damion Crawford said the one meal per needy student in primary and secondary schools would cost $9.7 billion.

The PNP is also estimating that the annual cost of phasing out the asset tax would be $2 billion, the cost of the income tax waiver to small businesses would be $1 billion and that funding tertiary education for the first university student in a family would cost $3.9 billion.

- Livern Barrett

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