A leading Trinidad and Tobago economist slammed the country's 2009/2010 budget Wednesday as underhanded and lacking ideas.Indera Sagewan-Alli made the comment while speaking at a post-Budget forum hosted by the Co-operative Credit Union League of Trinidad and Tobago and the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union (OWTU) in San Fernando.
"Faced with economic slowdown after a run of good times once again, many of hoped that good sense would finally prevail and that this budget would make the start of a new thinking towards sustainable economic transformation," she said.
Sagewan-Alli added, "From one year to another, the opening budget statement should outline the previous year's achievement, give reasons where targets are not realised, boast where they exceeded expectations and present the budgeted plans for the coming year against outcome indicators."
She said instead of doing that Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira's message was that in 2010 it would be spending as usual "and if oil and gas cannot pay for it, they will borrow or demand it from an already strained people".
Sagewan-Alli suggested that the minister should have spent more time accounting for the $46.4 billion spent in fiscal 2009 and how Government intended to spend the budgeted $44.3 in fiscal 2010 "and in particular how she intends to finance, spend and repay the $7.7 billion deficit".
She added, "The real question is will we the people whose money it is that is being spent allow Government to hide behind a few positive factors that can be wiped out in a matter of months?"
The economist also questioned the projected energy values on which the budget is tagged.
"While the oil price as US $55 per barrel is reasonable given the current projected trends, the price of gas at US $2.75 per mmbtu could prove the Achilles heel of the revenue base," she said.
Oil prices have been on the upswing since the budget announcement, trading Thursday at more than US$71 a barrel, nearly US$20 higher than the projected price in the budget.
Click here for a live minute-by-minute trading value of oil
At another post-budget forum senior economist Jwala Rambaran said Nunez-Tesheira must explain how the economy fell into such a huge deficit at the end of the fiscal year 2008-2009.
Speaking at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Port of Spain Rambaran said he is not convinced that Trinidad and Tobago can rebound from the huge deficit.
"If we look at where we were in September last year, we were originally expected to have a balanced budget, revenues matching expenditure," Rambaran pointed out.
"By the time we reached into January this year after two adjustments were made, we were told that there will now be a deficit position of $1.2 billion and, to me, the great surprise is that by the time the numbers were finally in and the budget read, that deficit of $1.2 billion turned into an even larger deficit of $8.4 billion."
He wondered how "in the face of what has been described as a blip, did we manage to move from a balanced position all the way to a deficit of $8.4 billion?"
Rambaran said he was not at all impressed with the budget noting that one of its major shortcomings is that it fails to address the issue of diversification.
He called it a "distressing example once again of wishful thinking countering reasoning and experience...I think this administration seems to have discounted all the lessons from the past year and seems to be moving ahead in a business-as-usual manner."
He concluded that such an attitude send the wrong message "that we could still remain complacent against the backdrop of what is still likely to be a very difficult journey ahead, not only for the world economy, but for the economy on which we rely a lot, which is the United States."
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