It costs $130 million a day to run Trinidad and Tobago, Finance Minister Colm Imbert has said. This works out to a monthly bill of $4 billion to run the country.
And Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley also says public servants need to say "thank God to the People's's National Movement Government for putting employment before everything else," because some experts saw that as the best option to cut cost.
"Even as we try to stabilise the difficult situation, even as we had serious difficult conditions to meet and advice from the experts to cut some more, cut some more and fire some more we have not done that. We have set about to reduce the expenditure and do it in a way to minimise the drastic effect that it would have on the individuals," Rowley said.
"The Government is the largest employer of labour in this country and we can balance the budget simply by cutting public servants, but we have not done that, we have gone slowly and cautiously."
Imbert and Rowley made the statements during the People's National Movement's (PNM) post-Budget political meeting at Piggott's corner in Belmont on Friday night. (See Page A5)
Imbert said when the People's Partnership government entered office in 2010 there was about $6 billion in cash in the Government's bank account in the Central Bank.
"They managed, between 2010 and 2012, to spend out that money and to take that account from $6 billion, that's six thousand million, in May 2010 down to zero in 2012 and then down to minus $9 billion in September 2015. They used up the whole overdraft, they burnt up $15 billion in cash," Imbert said.
"So we have been running this country for the last 24 months with the overdraft almost up to the limit. So that often we would be told you have to stop writing cheques, you have to stop issuing releases."
Imbert said three weeks before the national Budget was presented he received a letter from Central Bank Governor Dr Alvin Hilaire saying the country's overdraft was at 99.7 per cent of the limit. This meant there was only a couple million dollars available in the current account, which Imbert said was "enough to run the country for about five minutes." He said they were eventually able to get cash from the commercial banks to run the country.
"This has been a very, very, very difficult year but we made it through and we are going to make it through 2018 and we are going to make it through 2019 and we going to make it through 2020," he said.
On Monday, Imbert delivered the national budget with total expenditure for fiscal year 2018 estimated at $50.5 billion and revenue estimated at $45.74 billion. He said Government has been able to bring expenditure down from $63 billion to $50 billion.
"We cut it by $13 billion, that was no easy feat and you know what that tells you, there was $13 billion of waste, mismanagement and corruption in the government expenditure, because how could you remove $13 billion of government expenditure per year and the country still running. How that happen?" Imbert said.
"But we have a problem because even with the new taxes in this Budget at the best we will be able to raise $40 billion from taxation, so we are missing $10 (billion). With the new taxes and the best tax collection possible, and if we go after everybody who is evading tax and avoiding tax and we put an army of people outside there, which we will be doing, the most we could raise in this 2018 financial year is $40 billion," he said.
Imbert said one way to tackle the shortfall is by recovery debt from bailout of CLICO and CL Financial.
"We have to get that money back, that is taxpayers' money, that is poor people's money, that is your money and we need it to run the country. We need to recover that debt," he said.
Imbert said Government hopes to recover $5 billion from that debt this year following their "bold step" of putting CL Financial in liquidation.
If this was not done it would have been "crapaud smoke your pipe," he said. Government will create a mutual fund and put CL Financial assets there so citizens could buy units, he said.
He said Government also did not pander to anyone in the Budget.
"Everybody must share in the burden of adjustment, everyone. We are not in the pockets of any group. We have taken a hard look of this economy and that is why we looked at the commercial banks and saw they were making super profits, we have a recession going on, people scrunting and one of the banks making a billion dollars in profit, so they have to share in the adjustment and that is when we put an extra five per cent on the income tax of banks," Imbert said.
"To their credit I must say the majority of the banks are not complaining ,they understand that everybody must share the burden on adjustment."