$730M budget set for final vote
Marco Archer, Minister of Finance & Economic Development in the LA
(CNS): Members of the Legislative Assembly are expected to take the final vote Friday, after completing the scrutiny of government’s spending plan for the 2015/16 financial year. Core government spending, together with the costs of running the statutory authorities and government companies and financing the debt totals over three quarters of a billion dollars. But with the treasury expecting to collect a whopping $880 million in taxes, fees and other revenue, the public purse should have a surplus of more than $121 million.
Legislators have spent the last four weeks debating and examining the PPM-led government’s spending plans. Ministers have been questioned over the delivery of services and the reason for budget cuts or increases, and with eleven days to spare before the end of this fiscal year, the budget should be passed approved and assented to in time for the start of the new financial year on Wednesday 1 July.
As well as producing a significant surplus, Finance Minister Marco Archer said this budget also reduces the government’s debt to just over half a million dollars, but significantly this is the first budget since 2008 that complies fully with the requirements of the Public Management and Finance Law, freeing the strings of the public purse from the hands of the UK for forthcoming budgets.
Archer, who is being lauded as a prudent manager of public finances, has said there are no plans for spending sprees and increased borrowing in the 2016/17 spending plan. In his budget statement delivered on 15 May, he said that “achieving compliance” meant that government would not have to seek prior approval of the FCO to present an annual budget to the Legislative Assembly.
But he added that compliance did not mean that government could take on significant borrowing in the future, “if the effect of such new borrowing would breach the ratios in the Principles of Responsible Financial Management”.
He explained that the principles of good fiscal management and the ratios have to be satisfied every year.
“Unless there are extenuating circumstances, in order to ensure that borrowing does not occur to balance future budgets, it is necessary that government’s future expenditures do not grow at a faster rate than the country’s economic growth,” Archer added.
However, as the 2016/17 budget will be the majority PPM administrations last one before the 2017 general election, the public can probably look forward to a reduction in fees in Archer’s final spending plan before the national ballot. During his address last month Archer said that, with the restoration of sound public finances, government would be better placed to serve the community and have greater flexibility to deliver better services and infrastructure, increased employment opportunities, and lower fees and taxes.
“The people of these Islands were called upon to make sacrifices during the difficult period of the recent global recession,” he said “As minister with responsibility for finance, it is my duty and honour, along with my colleagues, to ensure that those sacrifices are not in vain, and to do my part in making sure that every dollar counts.”
Category: Government Finance, Politics
At least none of my family members
are indigent on govt. not my mom, sister or brother!!.
you call that saving money. YAWNING. Haha
Yawns!
Don’t ever count on your budget coming in I have a pen and it costs you people 10’s of MILLIONS
I am not very happy and quite jaded, you see when you sh*t on a loving person the pain you inflict will cost you 100x and that is what you are facing. I just want you all to know whats coming and why.
Change how you treat people before you are bankrupted by my pen
Whatever would the budget be if there was a defence budget line currently paid for by the tax-payers of oft criticized other countries?
Civil service = welfare by the back door + spineless vote buying.
Pension liabilities for civil servants = the ticking time bomb that will destroy the Cayman economy.
Stop crowing Marco, cut the civil service and be honest about pension liabilities.
Ok, but what about the missing 1 billion?
Have you checked the sofas?
Yes explain where that BILLION is. In a lot of people bank account. Check the banks.
So what will 730 million buy elsewhere?
The entire budget spent fighting Ebola in the african continent.
1.5 brand new Airbus aircraft
The Australian defence budget (and Afghan operations) entirely for one year.
A commercial trip to the moon.
The entire Canadian submarine fleet.
The war in Libya.
The Solomon Islands.
A wasp class aircraft carrier of 41,500 tons.
The entire budget to police Toronto, a city of 2.8 million people.
I am sure I have missed a few more worthy examples.
$730,000,000! That is a simply staggering amount to spend on a micro territory with a resident population of less than 60,000. And consider further that around half of that amount is going to be spent on salaries, pensions, health and benefits for approximately 6,000 civil servants.
With such massive spending how can it be that our public institutions and government agencies are performing so poorly? It boggles the mind.
Never, never in the history of national endeavor has so much been spent on so few to achieve so little.
Presumably you are referring to Mac and his world traveling cohorts who spent millions on personal travel, and a few law suits as well.
Leave Big Mac out of this. Do you have any other thoughts for tomorrow?
There is no surplus. CIG and Honorable Minister of Finance Marco Archer failed to include the Pension & Healthcare liabilities and other significant debts that CIG are exposed to.
For a country of 55,000 people to have a government budget of 730million that is a dangerous situation and should cause the fiscal conservatives in the country some sleepless nights.
For a bean counter you clearly don’t understand anything about public accounts and how surpluses are calculated. Pension and Healthcare liabilities are not debts because they are not currently due and payable. Of course they are taking into account debts: some of that money will be used to pay down existing debt and provide against those liabilities.
You have reported significant errors in your numbers. Government debt is not “just over half a million dollars”. It is just over half a billion dollars. Also, the “$7.3 million” budget you have reported is actually over $730 million.
PRFM = there’s no money for a new Pier structure (even if it was necessary or a good idea).
The Pier structure is not going to be paid for by CI govt…the cruise lines are going to pay for it.
You obviously believe in Father Christmas, Unicorns and the Easter Bunny if you fell for that line. The cruise lines will not pay for the project outright unless they control everything for several decades and that would include all retail and upland operations.
There is no such thing as a free lunch
Nor money to start dealing in a significant way with the dump problem. Why?
Also note that the pier is NOT / NOT going to be paid for by the cruise lines but by all Caymanians.