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Please publish as an open letter to Finance Minister Audley Shaw.
Dear Mr Shaw:
While you clamour for tax compliance to provide needed services in Jamaica, some of the services are not being provided. In Red Hills where I reside, within the last two to three months, we have had to endure inadequate pick-up of our garbage for seven weeks, and now we are into five more weeks since we have had any pick-up.
When you presented the second estimates of expenditure in 2009, you increased our property tax, indicating that one of the improved amenities we would have received was improved garbage pick-up. I must tell you that this service has worsened since that pronouncement.
At a meeting where we engaged our member of Parliament, Mr Andrew Gallimore last month, I brought up this matter. In his reply, he attempted to inform us that: Compared to Florida, for example, our property tax was minimal. I did not get the opportunity to reply to this assertion, but my comment is that, compared to Florida, the income structure is one-third that of workers performing the same task in the same profession here in Jamaica. In New York where I worked for over 25 years, a New Yorker gets five times as much as a worker here in Jamaica for the same task.
Regarding the tax structure, Jamaicans are over-taxed and under-serviced. New Yorkers pay a city tax, state tax, federal tax, property tax, social security and tax on some commodities such as gas. Here in Jamaica, Jamaicans pay National Housing Trust, National Insurance Scheme, education tax, GCT ( commodities), property tax and a gas tax.
This is a small country compared to New York, and other states in the United States, so why the comparison? I think a massive drive and awareness of producing more, rather than consuming foreign goods and services, is urgently needed to capitalise on the human resources in Jamaica. It is the only solution to this national dilemma.
I am, etc.,
FRANK HILL
Figureme1@yahoo.com
Red Hills,
St Andrew
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/2.../letters7.html
Dear Mr Shaw:
While you clamour for tax compliance to provide needed services in Jamaica, some of the services are not being provided. In Red Hills where I reside, within the last two to three months, we have had to endure inadequate pick-up of our garbage for seven weeks, and now we are into five more weeks since we have had any pick-up.
When you presented the second estimates of expenditure in 2009, you increased our property tax, indicating that one of the improved amenities we would have received was improved garbage pick-up. I must tell you that this service has worsened since that pronouncement.
At a meeting where we engaged our member of Parliament, Mr Andrew Gallimore last month, I brought up this matter. In his reply, he attempted to inform us that: Compared to Florida, for example, our property tax was minimal. I did not get the opportunity to reply to this assertion, but my comment is that, compared to Florida, the income structure is one-third that of workers performing the same task in the same profession here in Jamaica. In New York where I worked for over 25 years, a New Yorker gets five times as much as a worker here in Jamaica for the same task.
Regarding the tax structure, Jamaicans are over-taxed and under-serviced. New Yorkers pay a city tax, state tax, federal tax, property tax, social security and tax on some commodities such as gas. Here in Jamaica, Jamaicans pay National Housing Trust, National Insurance Scheme, education tax, GCT ( commodities), property tax and a gas tax.
This is a small country compared to New York, and other states in the United States, so why the comparison? I think a massive drive and awareness of producing more, rather than consuming foreign goods and services, is urgently needed to capitalise on the human resources in Jamaica. It is the only solution to this national dilemma.
I am, etc.,
FRANK HILL
Figureme1@yahoo.com
Red Hills,
St Andrew
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/2.../letters7.html
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