Cost of living outpaces salaries

Most families have critically looked into their expenses to figure out what obligation could be sacrificed this payday until next. This is the result of leadership’s negligence balancing salaries and the cost of living here. The latter has gone up by a whopping 20 percent while salaries remained stagnant!
Apparently, leadership has put on its facemask of “blind, deaf and mute” to avoid navigating the widening disparity to help simple villagers. Aren’t these the people you represent who yearn for leadership, especially today?

Today, salaries are drained right into the filthy swamp of high power bills, new increases in the price of food, new increase in health insurance, $1,000 in health deductible, and other must-pay family obligations. And the guys and gals have taken shelter under rusty tin awning hoping nobody notices their hibernation. Something’s seriously wrong with this widely growing disparity—salaries vs. cost of living—that are oceans apart.

Gov. Eulogio Inos braves announcing paying retirees what he’s decided to defer illegally. Esteemed Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan smiles nervously as he watches how the high cost of health premium via Obamacare has viciously robbed taxpayers’ of their buying power.

Kilili and his staff are exempted from it, thus the mute and dumb tiptoe through the garden of purposeful ignorance. No worries! Some 38 national Republicans have put aside differences to take Obamacare to the U.S. Supreme Court!

KiliInoscare: New health program?

No doubt, politicians pray and hope to be forgiven by voters (and I’m sure most would say “No mas!”) as the powerful storm of change is cemented in their minds. They’re recipients of hardship by negligence from “the walking dead” on the hill. Neither Kilili nor Inos has sought exemption or waiver from the feds on Obamacare. Perhaps they’ve turned it into KiliInoscare!

This view may poke the overly inflated ego of politicos who have neglected issues for far too long. But we know and understand with clarity what most of us have to endure in this woefully poor economic climate. How do we mitigate incompetence?

Households throughout the CNMI are literally struggling with five major expenses: basic food items, power bills, health insurance, real estate loan, and family transportation. Have you credible justification besides garbled and shallow explanations?

Under-employment

Two vital points kept weaving into mind as I keep my ears to the ground listening to the voice of our people and how leadership has failed royally at wealth and jobs creation. They are minimum wage and anchor investments. Simultaneously, there’s statistics that some 52 percent of workers Marianas-wide are under-employed.

When you are “under-employed,” it means you have a job that pays below the federal definition of poverty income level of $15K for singles and $24K for a family of four. We don’t even have to calculate how a family of four struggles with such a salary knowing that most of its income is spent on basic groceries, high power bills, real estate loan (first family home), family car, and other must-pay obligations.

In a nutshell, the cost of living has outpaced income levels by oceans apart. You begin to quiz “what went wrong?” It’s skyrocketed by 20 percent while salaries have turned into fossils for more than 10 years. No political put given that it’s family pocketbooks. It’s all in the palm of your hands!

Ignored anchor investment

About four years ago, an alternative energy proposal was presented to CUC that would eventually reduce power rates to appreciable levels while ensuring reliability and stability in power generation. It got nowhere except languish in political indecision.

Today we’re still stuck in the filthy swamp of high power bills as local politicians head to Guam to learn about liquefied natural gas (LNG or snake oil) as though it is the savior to ease the prohibitive power rates at home. Nah! It’s a costly fuel that would send the CNMI reeling for mea culpa as the price of LNG shoots into the heavens. I wonder if the evil geniuses from the hill understand the national and geopolitical politics of LNG?

Some six years ago another firm came in proposing to build a ship repair and building facility. We weren’t sure what the humongous proposal entails and so we pushed it aside hoping for divine miracles. We refused to understand the lasting economic stability and prosperity it offers the CNMI as one of several anchor investments. Look at the fiscal impotence of the CNMI today!

Dismissing Saipan as airline hub

Earlier, under a certain governor and CPA, we slammed Continental Airlines (United) the political arrogance we should have treated with red carpet treatment. It simply got up and moved to Guam establishing it as its hub. Gee! The dumb price of political arrogance stuffed in immaturity victimizing taxpayers in perpetuity.

In short, if we have had truly competent leadership then who were committed to enhancing the livelihood of our people, the Saipan International Airport would be humming with additional businesses supporting the airline industry today.

The new energy and ship repair facilities would have opened up over 1,000 jobs, paying each trainee some $7.50 per hour from initial training sessions through to completion. It’s a repeat of the boom years, only this time the anchor investments would be here permanently. But we’ve missed it once more, didn’t we? The concept is known as “wealth and jobs creation.”

John DelRosario Jr. is a former publisher of the Saipan Tribune and a former secretary of the Department of Public Lands.