And while that's certain to win political votes, right now the main political pressure point is gas pain!
That's the pain every consumer feels when he or she goes to the gas pump. And while you'll hear that the prices are directly related to the war in Ukraine, it might have been an easier pill to swallow if gas hadn't been on the rise long before the war started. Now, it's almost unbearable, and it's only going to get worse. The prime minister said today that it is out of their control, but that they plan to meet with the private sector, and he alluded to a top secret plan to ease some of the burden.
Hon. John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I have to point out that there a lot of factors that we have no control of where fuel is where it is right now. It is a crisis. The price of fuel without taxes it's already very high so what we are doing with the fuel issue, we have some ideas but I don't want to disclose them at this time, I would want t hear from the social partners, so tomorrow we're having a meeting with the social partners including the private sector and the public sector and we will have the ministry of finance and the central bank to do presentations to point out what historically the price of fuel, what the taxes we have been collecting, and where we are. In the last shipment of diesel, I think we already took a cut of over $400,000 that we did not pass on to the pump, it is something that we have to be doing jointly, private sector, public sector. We have the issue of a hurricane, a hurricane can come and hit us, COVID 19 is still around, another variant could come and hit us. So there are many factors, inflation, the war in Ukraine, all of these things we have no control of but I can tell you whatever that we can control, we are going to do our best to continue expand agriculture production, and exports, we will expand the tourism products, the services sector, the business sector, the energy sector, so there are lot of opportunities we have but we have to remain positive, we have to ensure that we can get these things done and we believe our government can get a lot of these things done."
