Guest Writer
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Fair Tax
Is it fair that the unemployed construction worker or the minimum wage earner is paying the same tax on diesel fuel used by CUC as the wealthy? On a percentage basis this is a grossly unfair way of taxing people. Some will argue that we all pay the same duty on a loaf of bread regardless of our financial position but this is understood and is part of the cost of living in Cayman.
We accept duties on imported goods as an alternative to income tax as a means of generating revenue for government. Fuel is quite a different commodity. We, like most countries, are a fossil fuel based economy. The basic cost of living is affected more by fuel prices than any other single cause. To tax fuel does indeed result in more revenue for government but has the damaging effect of increased cost of living, reduced GDP and higher unemployment.
Unlike the loaf of bread, fuel is an unavoidable necessity, even more so than toilet tissue. If the cost of toilet tissue became too expensive due to government tax then some people would find alternatives. We have no alternatives when it comes to fuel.
I am proposing that the current fuel tax on CUC diesel be implemented in a way that is fairer to the population as a whole.
The following table of a graduated tax is an example
Monthly Usage Tax Per Gallon
500 KWH or less NO TAX
501 KWH to 1200 KWH 25 cents
1201 KWH to 2000 KWH 50 cents
2000 KWH to 3000 KWH 1 dollar
Above 3000 KWH 5 dollars
These figures are not absolute but merely represent the idea of the big (wealthy) users paying a greater percentage of the tax bases on their ability to pay. It is not Robin Hood, where the rich pay for the poor. It is trying to approach a more fair basis on usage and the ability to pay.
It is important to understand that this graduated tax structure should only apply to residential customers and not to businesses or commercial properties. Business would simply pass the new cost on down to the customer, which would defeat the purpose. Businesses should have their tax reduced or removed to allow for lower cost of operation. When the working man has to pay more tax he cannot pass the cost to anyone. It becomes his burden alone.
Such a graduated tax structure would result in considerably more revenue for government than the current flat rate system. The increase in revenue could be so great as to allow for the total suspension of the tax on gasoline used for motor vehicles.
This will result in the majority of people having more spending power, which is what creates jobs and drives the economy.
CUC has all of the figures available for calculating the break points and amounts necessary to charge in order for government to reach the desired revenue goal. It would be good for the Electricity Regulatory Board to approach CUC to do some figuring. We all will benefit.
MLA says ‘Hilton’ funds could have been better spent
(CNS): The First Elected Member for Cayman Brac and Little Cayman believes that the money being spent on the emergency shelter on Cayman Brac’s Bluff would have been better invested in a newhigh school for the island. MLA Moses Kirkconnell told CNS that the site of 'Hurricane Hilton', as it has been dubbed, would have the ideal location for a new high school campus as it is located right next to the Bluff football field and that the current campus in Stake Bay could have been turned into a vocational school or a hotel training school, which could have attracted students from Grand Cayman. “I believe that money could have been spent more wisely,” said Kirkconnell.
"There should have been a high school on the Bluff that could have doubled as a shelter. I believe that the young people of Cayman Brac deserve a new high school and where the shelter is being built would have been the perfect place for it because the playing field is right next to it. Given the success that the students of the Brac high school have had, it would really have been the gem of the Cayman Islands.”
Island Builders was awarded the contract to build the foundation for the main hall of the emergency shelter and the cistern for $285,000, the lowest of the five bids submitted to the Central Tenders Committee (CTC). Dean Scott, the owner of the company, told CNS that it was decided by the Ministry of District Administration to let smaller firms work on each phase of the project rather than a large firm working on all phases. Work on the first phase started shortly after the opening ceremony in May.
“Basically, the shelter will be of benefit of all Caymanians,” said Scott. “I am proud to be a Cayman Bracker working on this project and it is something that I’m pretty sure everybody will be proud of.”
Hurricane Hilton is located on Major Donald Drive and will cover 36,111 square feet when completed. According to the plans, in phase 1 (the main building) the first storey will include the main hall, plus a sick bay, reception area, kitchen and several bathrooms. The second floor will include the command centre, office and conference room. Phase 2 consists of four 2-storey “wings” to the building, each wing with 10 private rooms on each floor, each room with a semi-private bathroom (one for every two rooms).
Deputy Premier Juliana O’Connor Connolly has previously told CNS that the rooms will have individual temperature control because, she said, during Hurricane Paloma some people were too hot and some were too cold and there was no privacy for the elderly or disabled.
The main hall will accommodate up to 400 people in a storm and each wing will house an additional 100 adults, so the new building adds another 800 shelter spaces to Cayman Brac. When there is an emergency, the private rooms will be allocated on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis, though the deputy premier has said that if a major hurricane was approaching they could allocate one wing for hospital patients.
This new emergency shelter will be the fourth on the island. The Aston Rutty Civic Centre on the Bluff can hold approximately 500 people, while the West End Primary School, which has been structurally upgraded since Paloma, can hold 250, and the Brac Day Care Centre, located next to the civic centre, can hold 155.
The District Administration Building, while not an official emergency centre, also shelters DA staff and their families, and the rebuilt Veteran’s and Seaman’s Center is an unofficial shelter. In addition, many new homes are being built on the Bluff, where people remain during a storm, and two new churches on the Bluff that were built to hurricane standards have been recently completed.
Rotarians working to extend Brac library
(CNS): The Rotary Club of Cayman Brac is hoping to add an extension to the Cayman Brac Public Library. According to Club President Brian Enright, an estimated $80,000 is needed to get the project going, but only $5,000 has been raised so far. There has been a fund established for the extension, The Rotary Club of Cayman Brac Library Fund, and there are more fundraisers being planned to increase funds for the project. Enright said that the construction of the extension was a long term goal of the club and that it could take a few years to accomplish. The proposal for the extension was made by John Elliot, who served as club president from 2007-2009.
Immediate Past President Andrea Stevens said that fundraising efforts for the project have been ongoing for a few years and that the formal architectural plans for the project would be submitted to the Planning Department for approval when enough funds have been raised. While no time frame has been set for construction work to begin, the new president said he was hoping that volunteers from the construction industry would build the extension, which would cut costs substantially.
The current library building was built by the Brac Rotary Club and was officially opened in 1995. While Rotary retains ownership of the building, the library falls under the Ministry of Education, Training, Employment, Youth, Sports & Culture and the government paysstaff salaries and purchases books.
Members of the public can help by donating money to the cause. Cheques can be made payable to either the Rotary Club of Cayman Brac or the Rotary Club of Cayman Brac Library Fund or cash can be given to any Brac Rotary Club member in a sealed envelope.
“Our hope is to build an extension to the library, so it can continue to meet the needs of Cayman Brac,” said Enright. “This project could be one way that the Rotary Club of Cayman Brac would be able to support the increased emphasis on literacy in the Cayman Islands.”
Enright took up the post of president at a Rotary changeover ceremony on 2 July. After being installed in his new position, Enright promised to continue the work started by Past President Stevens and set his theme for his time in the position: “Pulling together in one direction for the common good of the Brac”. Rotary Assistant Governor Rosie Jamieson travelled from Grand Cayman to install new club members.
UK Government e-petition website launched
(The Guardian): The Commons Speaker, John Bercow, has emerged as a strong supporter of government plans to allow electronic petitions as a way of shaping the parliamentary agenda and increasing public engagement. A government e-petition website will go live on Thursday, showing petitions that have been accepted for consideration for debate in the Commons. The leader of the house, Sir George Young, has saidpetitions that garner more than 100,000 signatures should warrant consideration for debate. Bercow is understood to be flexible about how parliament should be seen to be responding to an e-petition garnering big support.
He does not necessarily think every issue should be considered at a full- length debate, but might simply require a minister to come to the house and answer a question on the issue. The e-petition page on the government's Directgov website will show the e-petitions that have been accepted so far.
It is widely expected that supporters of capital punishment, immigration controls, withdrawal from Europe and opposition to green taxes will initially dominate. An e-petition will only be allowed to stay on the website for a year, and duplicates will not be allowed.
Mubarak stands trial in Egypt
(New York Times): An ailing Hosni Mubarak, who served longer than any ruler of modern Egypt until he was overthrown in a revolution in February, was rolled into a courtroom in a hospital bed on Wednesday and charged with corruption and complicity in the killing of protesters. The trial was a seminal moment for Egypt and an Arab world roiled by revolt. Even the most ardent in calling for his prosecution doubted until hours before the trial began that Mr. Mubarak, 83, would appear, a reflection of the suspicion and unease that reigns here. As a helicopter ferried him to the courtroom, housed in a police academy that once bore his name, cheers went up from a crowd gathered outside.
“The criminal is coming!” shouted Maged Wahba, a 40-year-old lawyer.
The sheer symbolism of the day made it one of the most visceral episodes in modern Arab history. In a region whose destiny was so long determined by rulers who deemed their people unfit to rule, one of those rulers was being tried by his public. On this day, the aura of power — uncontested and distant — was made mundane, and Mr. Mubarak, the former president, dressed in white and bearing a look some read as disdain, was humbled.
Twitter valued at $8bn after large investment
(The Guardian): Twitter, the microblogging website that lets users tweet messages of 140 characters or less, is now worth $8bn (£4.9bn). The firm's new price tag comes after a $400m investment in the loss-making venture from serial social media investor DST Global. Twitter is now nominally worth about the same as rating agency Moody's, which had revenues of $1.2bn in the first six months of 2011 and is nearly as valuable as Marks & Spencer.The huge valuation reflects high expectations for the company. Confirming the investment, Twitter also announced that its users now send 200m tweets a day, up from 65m a year ago.
Heritage home becomes Creek Post Office
(CNS): The Creek Post Office on Cayman Brac reopened last month after nearly three years of closure due to severe damage from Hurricane Paloma in November 2008. After the search for a new post office building, the home of the island’s first midwife Petrona Connolly-Bodden was selected due to its significant heritage value. After minor modifications were made to the structure to accommodate its current use, the building, which houses both the Creek Post Office and Sister Islands Sports Office, was officially opened on 8 July.
During the rebuilding phase of the post office, the Creek post office boxes were moved into unrented boxes at West End Post Office, thus allowing Creek box holders to access their boxes. Four of the five post offices on Cayman Brac were damaged, with the one at Creek being the most severely damaged of the four. After the 2009 general elections, the Minister of District Administration Julianna O’Connor-Connolly, who has responsibility over postal services, began searching for an alternate site for the Creek Post Office. In the meantime, the district manager for Creek Post Office was stationed at the Stake Bay Post Office shortly after Hurricane Paloma and then at Spot Bay Post Office when it reopened in May 2009.
The new post office, located at 5 Cantlin Drive, has 34 post office boxes and customers can top-up mobile phones for LIME and Digicel and make WestStar payments there. The post office opens on Monday – Thursday from 9am – 11:30am and 1:30pm – 3:00pm, on Friday from 9am – 11:30am and 1:30pm – 3:30pm and on Saturday from 9am – 11:30am.
The Ministry of District Administration says that they are considering their options on what to do with the former condemned post office building, located within Creek Cemetery. However, the ministry says they will move the building to provide more room for the cemetery at the very least.
The official opening was attended by Minister of District Administration and Deputy Premier Juliana O’Connor-Connolly, Acting Permanent Secretary of Distract Administration Tristan Hydes, Acting Deputy Permanent Secretary of District Administration Jonathon Jackson, Sister Islands District Commissioner Ernie Scott and Postmaster General Sheena Glasgow.
15-year-old Joshua Dilbert is a CNS summer intern.
Cayman athletes continue to shine
(CNS): A number of local athletes have performed well in regional and international sport meets continue to improve – especially those of younger sportspersons – in events including races, jumps, swimming and rugby. Last weekend, Cayman participated in the Pan American Junior Championships in Florida, according to a GIS release. Alex Pascal, one of the youngest participants, scored a personal best in the javelin throw, placing ninth overall. He is now ranked number two in the Caribbean in this event. Cayman’s National Track and Field Team also attended the Central America and Caribbean (CAC) Senior Championships in Puerto Rico earlier this month.
Local runner Jon Rankin (fourth from right in picture above) captured third place in the 1,500meter race, taking the bronze medal behind Venezuela and Mexico. Carl Morgan placed fourth in the long jump.
Other team members at that meet were Carlos Morgan (long jump); Michael Letterlough (hammer throw); Ronald Forbes (110m hurdles); Kemar Hyman (100m sprint); and Junior Hines (400m hurdles). The athletes were accompanied by National Track and Field Coach Kenrick Williams and Manager Michael Naulty.
Coach Williams reported that most team members were trying to achieve the ’A’ or ’B’ standards required for participation in next month’s Senior World Championships in South Korea.
Ronald Forbes has already qualified for the 110m hurdles in Korea, but he used the CAC meet to gauge his personal performance. Cydonie Mothersill-Stephens has also qualified for Korea’s 200m race, but didn’t attend the CAC Games.
In spite of some injuries and other setbacks, national team athletes also did well earlier in the season. During May’s CARIFTA Games, Cayman’s Jorel Belafonte won a silver medal in the 1,500m race.
Then, at the Islands Games earlier this month, Cayman won four gold medals (in long jump, triple jump, relay, and 100m), three silvers (hammer throw, 200m and 400m) and two bronze (100m and hurdles). In so doing, they also set two new records, in the relay and triple jump. And there was more to come, for in last month’s World Youth Championships in France, Alex Pascal outdid himself, scoring a personal record in the javelin throw.
Cayman’s Women’s and Under-19 rugby teams have also had winning seasons.
South Korea apart, Cayman’s athletes still have a few more events to attend this season. This week brothers Shaune and Brett Fraser are swimming in the International Swimming Federation’s World Championships in Shanghai.
Other coming events include the Commonwealth Youth Games in the Isle of Man in September; and in October, the Senior Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Continuing his active support of sports and athletics, Ministry of Sports Mark Scotland congratulated the team members and officials.
“At the same time they’re striving for personal bests, these young people are making their team – and the Cayman Islands – proud of their spirit of excellence,” he said.
For more information on the track and field scene, contact the Sports Department on 949-7082; go online to caymanactive.com; contact the Cayman Islands Track and Field Association on 926-3939, orvisit the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) website www.iaaf.org.
Hyperbaric chamber looks to add volunteers
(CNS): Hoping to add to his team of volunteers, John Elliott, Director of Cayman Hyperbaric Services, is planning a training course this fall to teach up to 12 people how to monitor the equipment that treats divers suffering from the bends. Working right now with a dedicated corps of 30 volunteers who can be called in at all hours to operate the hyperbaric chamber at the Cayman Islands Hospital (with six technicians operating the facility on Cayman Brac), Elliott says that, at times, the pool of available staff can be low.
Holidays, work hours and sickness can deplete the full complement of technicians, and at least three people are needed at any one time to monitor the equipment from the outside and sit with the patient in the chamber.
The close-knit group, however,is always ready to answer the call, and recently dealt with two cases of people suffering from decompression sickness, one a tourist off a cruise ship and the other, 17-year-old Caymanian Elizabeth Schvartz.
After a morning dive on Saturday, 9 July, Schvartz felt unwell, complaining of a headache, and chest and back pain. When the symptoms didn’t subside by evening, her parents took her to the Accident & Emergency Unit at the hospital where the doctor decided she needed to go into the chamber.
At about 1:30am, Dr Denise Osterloh, one of three physicians on-island trained to deal with decompression illness, was called. In less than an hour, the volunteer team was being assembled. “We always manage but sometimes it is a struggle to get people. We can always do with more volunteers,” she said, while praising the current members of the team, who only receive a small stipend per contact hour for the work they do.
“I think they do a fabulous job and everyone always speaks highly of them. They are a great bunch of people. They keep patients occupied who are in a highly anxious, nervous state in a small environment. They are available any hour of the day. They are a very valuable part because without them, no matter what we know, we can’t do the treatment.”
Schvartz’s parents watched the technicians in action through the night. “As her parents, we were amazed at these people,” said mom, Mia Schvartz. “Nobody made us feel it was an inconvenience for them to come out at 4, 5, 6 in the morning. It was just: ‘We’re here. How can we help?’”
Each technician can only sit inside the chamber for about an hour, requiring a rota of volunteers to come in during the average five hours it takes for a patient to recompress. With so many technicians needed for each session, it can be a challenge to organize a crew from the 30 volunteers available, hence the plan for another training course.
But the ones that continue to help make a big impression. “They have full-time jobs yet they will crawl out of their beds or come during their lunch hour to help,” Schvartz said. “I don’t feel like there were enough thank yous I could say. As parents, we couldn’t do anything but watch them take care of our daughter.” Marcel Archer, who has been volunteering since 1982, was one of the technicians who answered the call that evening. “I’ve been a volunteer so long it is probably part of my DNA by now,” he said.
Archer, a trained paramedic and nurse, spent an hour in the chamber with Elizabeth. He said his approach with patients is to “uplift their spirits, keep them distracted, and keep them alert and calm as possible so they do not feel claustrophobic or frightened or tense.”
He also noted that the team could use more people. “It’s one of those services that is essential but from a medical standpoint, there are very few who are trained to do it. Due to the small number of volunteers, it is difficult to respond. We get a small window of opportunity to commence treatment. The longer it takes for treatment to start, the worse the prognosis.”
Elliott, together with his wife, Ann, has been running Cayman Hyperbaric Services since 1996, taking over from the British Sub-Aqua Club, but both have at least 25 years experience in operating the decompression chamber.
Though not as busy as it was a few decades ago, an average of 40 to 45 patients every year come to them with decompression sickness. But when the call goes out, there needs to be enough technicians ready to come in.
“Every one of us are divers and first of all, we do it because it is in our blood. No one gets involved for the finance of it,” John Elliott said.
“We look at the team as a big family.”
Cayman Hyperbaric Services can be contacted by email by diveraid@candw.ky or by telephone at 949-8600 extension 2579 or 949-2989.
Corruption
Two Viewpoints on Corruption have been posted recently by Aristophanes Duckpond, and several readers have concluded that I am Aristophanes Duckpond. I am not. It is great that this person is writing about corruption, but I cannot take the credit for it. I would like to add one thing to the discussion.
The first and best defence against corruption is an electorate who recognize what a dangerous and damaging thing it is, and use their votes to throw out anyone who they think is guilty of it. By all means let’s discuss improvements to the law, but don’t give up the first line of defence.
If you look around the world at the countries which are in a total mess, most of them suffer from large scale corruption, people in power taking pay-offs or finding other ways to use their power to benefit themselves. This is not a coincidence. Of course there are other ways of ruining a country – war and famine for example — but corruption is the most common way for a country to become a hellhole for its people.
If corruption is allowed to exist, it will grow. It will destroy prosperity. Honest businesses will suffer. Investors will be discouraged; why would an investor accept an arbitrary tax system in which he has no idea how much the payments will be or how often they will have to be paid? Investors from major jurisdictions risk criminal prosecution in their own countries if they pay off people elsewhere. Institutional investors cannot risk this sort of damage to their reputation.
Corruption will destroy fairness and justice, not only in government and business but throughout society. It will also encourage lawlessness; why respect the law if your government does not? Corruption will undermine the country’s international standing and its ability to deal effectively with other countries and international organizations.
There is no upside to corruption. Once people start to think corruption is inevitable, or that a little corruption does no harm, or that corruption is OK as long as the politicians take care of business, or that corruption is something for others to worry about, their country is on the slippery slope.
Do not think a country can easily turn back if corruption gets worse. People in corrupt countries understand well enough the need to get rid of corruption; but they cannot do it. It is a quicksand.
Zero tolerance is the only effective defence. All politicians are faced by temptation. If they think voters will let them get away with corruption, be sure some will give in to temptation. There will be corruption. Do not imagine that the law will deter them if voters do not care. All countries have laws against corruption.
If you want prosperity, security and justice in your country, you need to use your vote to say “no” to corruption. If you don’t, you are at the heart of your country’s problem.