The Prime Minister will present the budget on March 17th, one week from Friday. It's a particularly late presentation for this administration which has tended to January and February presentations but it was held off so as not to adversely affect the PUP's chances at the polls. Not much good that did, but now there's a great deal of speculation about what's inside the budget. Well, according to a Cabinet release, one thing you can be sure is not in there is a new tax.
The Cabinet release says that "the draft estimates propose no new tax measures above the general sales tax" and government already said that the sales tax will be revenue neutral, which means it proposes to collect no more taxes than the current sales tax.
And while that seems to be the good news, the bad news is that according to the team of international debt management experts hired by government, there is a $190 million shortfall for debt commitments that government has to find. While government has hoped to buffer itself from that shock with soft loans from Taiwan and Venezuela, those will not be enough to cover the shortfall, so some other strategy will have to be pursued. We await the budget to see what those will be.
