Business community needs help

The Issue: Bad economic times is felt most in the business community throughout the NMI.

Our View: This sector needs help too in order to muddle through the continuing, deepening crisis.

Perhaps, the very nature of the public sector–never required to show profit margins at year’s end–perpetuates the predator-prey relationship. In this case, the predator is the public sector, the prey being the private sector.

This well honed behavior needs serious review given the fact that revenue generation has gone deep south and continues to do so. While we’d like to think that we would find other economic substitutes (investments), our track records demonstrate that we can’t even handle current investments with a sense of maturity. In a simple and timely reminder: “The past indicates the future”.

Under certain statutes, the business community is mandated to train locals at entry or higher level jobs. We view it as a must and still impose it with arrogance like there’s no tomorrow. At the same time, we never see such training as expenses on the part of the business community where marginal profits must be a daily event. And despite job transfer or abandonment, we still insist that the business community puts up with such statutory mandate.
Don’t they deserve a break too on this very aspect of the law amidst the current crisis?

If in fact austerity really matters to one and all, then we would see some semblance of prudence in the expenditure of public funds.
It would have included a reduction in the already bloated public sector, reduction of a bicameral legislature to unicameral system, and the effective elimination of LNOs on Guam, the Philippines and Washington, D.C.

All the niceties that we have seen thus far only confirm the exact opposite as to display our obvious lack of resolve to put our mouths where our money is, so to speak. If one disagrees, then take a quick glimpse into the current deficit (which continues to pile up by leaps and bounds) and mirror it against revenue generation. It’s a bleak picture that tells that we have failed the test of real management skills. It still is stuck at the political niceties level riddled with empty lip services.

If the business community can downsize its operations to make ends meet, then this juvenile behavior on the part of the public sector would have to change whether we like it or not. After all, it’s your tax money! Si Yuus Maase`!