January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
The real Muppets blindly backed the Budget
What I want to consider is exactly who, this week, the discredited Muppets are.
The same day Sen. Bean issued his analysis, the Education Minister made the hair-raising confession that his ministry was forced to slash $6 million from its budget "literally a day or two" before the government budget document was printed.
If that wasn't enough to shake your confidence, he said that cuts in the budget weren't actually the real cuts. The real cuts would be spread around in various different ways, he promised, after the budget had been passed.
The same day, the Premier and the Opposition Leader publicly squabbled over who taught who a lesson by depriving the other of debate time.
The Opposition deliberately scheduled the tourism debate on a day when the Premier was at a Caricom leaders' meeting in Dominica; the Premier deliberately droned on for 3 hours 59 minutes and 30 seconds on the Cabinet Office budget, leaving the Opposition Leader 30 seconds.
But you already heard that. In fact, it is probably one of the handful of things most people heard, understood and remembered about the budget.
Of course, you also realize that, while raising taxes and cutting positions in education, the Government also tried to raise the Finance Minister's salary by 50 per cent - a raise that the Finance Minister herself said she would not accept, even though she voted for it.
Who's discredited? Who's a Muppet?
The environmental group BEST, at least, is actively and openly fighting for the environment, and doing a pretty good job at it.
The Government - well, is it actively and openly fighting for the good government of the people of Bermuda? Is it doing a good job at it?
Budgets are the lifeblood of any government. When you decide how you will raise money and how you will use it, you've pretty much decided how you will run the country.
We are in treacherous economic times. A shrinking economy has shrunk government income, government debt expands alarmingly, and significant tax increases are in the works.
The consequences of this government's budget decisions are far-reaching. There are perils all over the place.
International businesses are shifting their jobs overseas, hotels have closed, local businesses are going belly-up and local workers are losing their jobs, and there are warnings of worse things to come.
Serious consequences
We know there are serious consequences to government's tax-raising plans.
The payroll tax increase means less income for workers, and higher expenses for companies. It will be especially burdensome for the many local firms that are losing money or barely making ends meet.
The increase in foreign currency tax means, pretty directly, that imports (which is just about everything in Bermuda) will go up in price. The buying power of the Bermuda Dollar, relative to the U.S. dollar, will drop.
This budget also sets the spending for a public education system - in an ad hoc kind of way, as we have seen - at a vital time in its desperate effort to reform.
This is serious stuff, worthy of intense scrutiny and debate.
But we aren't getting it.
Part of the reason is the atmosphere of partisan disdain that prevails in our Parliament, and part of it is our political culture of secrecy and arrogance.
Mostly, though, it is a system that requires blind loyalty from the Cabinet Ministers, and automatic party obedience from the people elected to represent us.
MPs and Senators like Marc Bean (dare I say it) are Muppets. They will vote how their party votes.
During their so-called budget debate, they will not hold a single hearing into a single one of the budget's proposals.
They will question any expert economist, or consult any expert of any kind.
They will not hear any direct testimony - not even 30 seconds worth at the end of the day - from any department head, or any civil servant of any calibre or qualification.
At the end of the day, our Parliament will vote on the country's budget without questioning anybody who is profoundly affected by the actions they are about to take.
This is the system they inherited. It was set up to run a sluggish little colony decades ago.
It surely wasn't a good system then.
It certainly doesn't cut it now, in a bigger, more complicated Bermuda.
You can't blame our current crop of budget Muppets for creating this system.
But you can - and should - blame them for going along with it. The system has to change. It is an irresponsible and damaging way to run modern Bermuda.
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