In Belize, when the prices of imported goods and locally produced meat, eggs, and fish increase, they never come down. The only products in the marketplace that sometimes decrease in price are locally produced fruits and vegetables; but of late, unfortunately, even that little “reprieve” has been taken away from Belizean consumers. It is the norm that there is a glut of locally produced fruits and vegetables in their respective seasons, and a consequent decrease in prices; but droughts, floods, extreme heat, and pest pressure have decimated production of recent.
Prices going up is as consistent as night following day, not only in Belize. In the recent election in the US to choose a new president, the candidate for the Republican Party, Donald Trump, was unrelenting in casting a spotlight on the state of that country’s economy under the incumbent, President Joe Biden, of the Democratic Party. A report from CNN Business said Trump said, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.” A CNN report said two-thirds of US voters who were interviewed after casting their ballots thought the country’s economy was not doing well, “despite historically low unemployment”, and that 69% of those who thought the economy was poor, voted for Trump.
On the eve of taking the reins, Trump isn’t certain about his capacity to reduce the cost of living. According to a story in USA Today, when asked by Time Magazine if “he would consider his presidency a failure if costs didn’t come down for consumers”, Trump said: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up; I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” Trump has said he expects improving the supply chain, cutting regulations, and increased drilling for oil would help ease the pressure on the price of goods for US consumers.
We have no control over goods produced abroad or the global supply chains. When the pandemic hit, the “supply chain” for tourists who are served by our tourism industry shut down and we were left with unemployed chefs and tour guides, empty hotels and buses, and closed tourist attractions. We sell services (tourism and BPO) and raw products (citrus, bananas, lobster/fish/conch, and sugar). With our earnings we pay for imports of fuels, cement, bitumen, fertilizers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, tools, machines and parts, electric wires and motors, electronics, canned goods, cereals, most everything in the grocery shops, and we have no say in the price of those goods when the ships land them here.
There aren’t many climate change deniers in Belize; we know that environmental degradation is the cause of climate extremes that threaten our production of food and the health of our reef system, and that cutting back on environmental regulations is counterproductive, so that is off the table. To attract foreign investors, we have cut regulations and increased incentives to the point where our only real benefit is job creation, so there’s nothing more to give there.
One area the new American government is sure to tweak is the amount of tax paid by the wealthy. It is standard policy for Republican governments to reduce taxes for the rich, the argument there being that the rich will use the increased wealth in their pockets to create businesses and employ people. Detractors say giving the money to the rich only serves the rich. Republican governments also cut subsidies for the US healthcare system, which many experts say is the worst among the wealthy nations. When Trump “joked” that Canada would do well to become a state of the US, former presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders “joked” that he would support that proposition if the US adopted the Canadian health system.
It’s difficult for our government to reduce taxes. The government collects taxes and spends it on infrastructure, services, education, health, sports, and other programs for the people. Government also uses the tax system to guide development. Diesel – the fuel of agriculture, road builders, and big industry – has constantly been cheaper at the pump than gasoline. In a 2023 government report, the acquisition cost of diesel was $1.38 higher than the cost of premium fuel, but diesel was $0.85 cheaper at the pumps, mainly because the tax on it was $2.13 lower. The GST on luxury goods, and the sin taxes, apart from bolstering the national treasury, serve to reduce the consumption of unhealthy products and imports.
In one notable attempt to ease the financial pressure on the public, the government has set a new threshold for income tax exemption, upped it from $26,000 to $29,000, a move which reportedly benefited around 3,000 individuals. The biggest clamor out there, however, is for a reduction in the tax on fuels. There’s talk, but none of the proponents of reduced fuel taxes have said by how much we should reduce it, and what programs government should forego with its reduced budget.
About the cost of living, we can fight price gouging, and complain, but our focus should be on areas where we can engage in productive talk.
Our main path to “winning” has to be the not so easy task of increasing the dollars in our pockets. Finding an oil well would put more money in our pockets, but wouldn’t bring down costs, because we don’t have an oil refinery. We found oil a couple decades ago, and our standard of living didn’t improve much. It might be that we are unlucky. Just about the time we experienced the oil “boom,” our citrus and farmed shrimp industries started to collapse.
Increasing the minimum wage was a bold and necessary step to lift the standard of living for those at the bottom of the ladder. We need, however, to also create more and better-paying jobs. The present emphasis on small businesses is a big step toward delivering on that need.
There are the matters of corruption and competence. On the matter of graft, it’s hard to say how much we lose to unscrupulous sorts. We know our oversight bodies need more teeth. The Boledo was a revelation. For years many Belizeans were saying that we were being “had” by a few, and we didn’t KNOW that for a fact until the present government, in an extremely bold move, “tek bak di Boledo”.
A 7News report said that the previous government had said that it was motivated to give a ten-year contract to a private company to run the Boledo in 2009 because the annual take for the national treasury was under a million dollars. While many mouths were feeding off the old system, the privatized version concentrated the bulk of the spoils in a single entity. We know the rest of the story. The government was condemned when it issued a second ten-year contract to the favored group; a new government seized control; and this year our national coffers realized a whopping $15 million in profits from Boledo sales. The managers of our Boledo have floated the idea of government introducing more games.
Only the people can decide if the decisions of government—putting emphasis on livestock production, nationalizing the Port of Belize Ltd., expanding national health insurance, investing substantially in small businesses, building starter homes for deprived families, facilitating ownership of land for the landless, and a number of other initiatives—were the right ones. Every four or five years, not more, we go to the polls to choose a new government. If we like the path the incumbents are on, we vote in elections to stay “pahn track”; if we don’t, we vote for new leadership.
We won’t decrease the cost of the goods we import. But we have the tools to deliver a higher standard of living. Productive talk, focusing on the things we can control, and careful spending, and increasing our earnings, will get us to that place where we all win.