Sunday, April 5, 2009

Where are your own ideas for a stimulus?

Listening from a distance, I got the feeling that the Town Hall-style State-of-the-Union type address and question session by Grenada’s Prime Minister Tillman Thomas at the Grenada Trade Center went down very well.

Of course the critics – and there seem to be a small minority of the Allan Campbell level – has dismissed it as purely as a public relations stunt.There is always an aspect of public relations in every aspect of explaining policy and ideas. But to dismiss it as just that – is either to miss the point, or is a roundabout way of saying there were good ideas which I could not really criticize.

I have read elsewhere the comments of former Finance Minister Anthony Boatswain and New National Party’s current spokesman on economics Kennedy Roberts – who both dismissed the outline of the stimulus package as nothing new.

They both claimed that what was outlined was just some of the old policies and approaches for the former NNP government.By saying that they either did not hear, care to listen or being plain disingenuous. If you ask me to bet on any of those I would take the very latter.

But that aside, if we buy that argument, I would have thought that these two would have hailed the “policies” they had help crafted as the genuine panacea for Grenada’s faltering economy.

Somehow I got disconnected from the argument that these are some of our old policies, and the implicit criticism that they are not adequate.

So what does that say about their previous approaches to the economic challenge?

And while, they are at it – accepting the view that the policies outline were not enough – what are their own ideas for what else can be done?

Give us some concrete ideas sirs, rather than grandstanding.

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