THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

IT'S UNFAIR that, as your Alternative Minister of Finance, I have only 750 words in a five-minute read to outline my budget when the Right Honourable and Much Shorter Colm Imbert took five hours on Monday over his 167-page version (read with the dramatic zest of the old funeral announcements on Radio Trinidad). I think I deserve equal time, if only because I will do something more than remove VAT on pigtail.

Here, then, is my budget. All the words

not in italics in the first paragraph are lifted direct from Colm's speech.

Madam

Editor, it is my honour to present to this Honourable

Newsday my Mock Budget. I am indebted to the Prime Minister for the confidence he has reposed in me as Minister of Finance over the last six years

even though I obviously bus' on the first five. TT was affected immediately by the pandemic (but) under the incisive leadership of the PM we took swift action to

tell Inshan Ishmael to kiss the rottweiler ar-.

I wish to express my appreciation to those essential workers who have kept operational the key engines of the economy and my colleagues who designed and vigorously implemented our wide-ranging and broad-based response to the virus. It would be remiss of me not to

use a dozen words when one would do in a string of cliches as long as my arm; well, not my arm - a tall person's arm.

That's enough parody. In my Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure and Fiscal and Other Measures, I again take my tone from Colm.

Madam Editor, white people will save our collective ar-- via the energy tax

ah-gain but most of those better energy prices will vanish under much higher imported-goods prices. After 60 years of talking about diversifying the economy, the only thing we diversified was which band of political conmen loot the Treasury.

Madam Editor, my suggestion is that we don't spend a penny which we haven't earned ourselves.

Which gives us a budget of $0. Zero dullers. Cero Bolivares in Cascade. We can't buy anything because we haven't earned anything. So we have no Medium-term Framework except Extended Guava Season and no Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure except Broken To Thief.

Madam Editor, the rubrics under which we pretend to make annual fiscal allocations for Education, Health, National Security, Works and Transport, Agriculture are demonstrably meaningless, if we take one example, Education.

After six decades and multiple billions of dollars spent, every year, we still 'graduate' too many functionally illiterate CXC classes that care more about their 'grads' than their grades. Some self-proclaimed intellectuals are so stupid, they boast about being anti-vaxxers. Madam Editor, we have become a nation afraid of denouncing dunces.

But there is hope for us as a nation, and it comes from the most unlikely of sources, the Attorney Gener