Monument #1
George Town is dying. Restaurants are closing and armed robberies are moving north. The logical thing to do would be to allow the building of residential condo housing in George Town so as to have people in the downtown core at night. The Government owns arguably one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the Cayman Islands overlooking the water; the site of the old Tower Building. Why not sell the site to a developer with permission to build residential condos?
This would be a win-win; the Government would receive the sale proceeds and George Town would have residential traffic at night to populate the streets and the existing restaurants (with or without a new docking facility). Unfortunately, Government wants to erect a tower to our shortsightedness on the site; a monument to our Christian heritage.
Don’t get me wrong; this is the best heritage to have. However, I would have thought that the numerous churches existing on the Islands would have attested sufficiently to our Christian heritage, including the Elmslie Memorial United Church situated on Harbour Drive.
Monument #2
It should be clear to anyone who is paying attention that the proposed port in the East End is a non-starter. No one wishes to see Ezzard or Arden with tractor tracks across their chests, the water lens put into danger or heavy trucks plying the route from the East End to the rest of the Island. No one wishes to see the civil disorder that will result from the Government continuing to push this unpopular project. There are far larger battles to fight, including our fiscal distress.
Monument #3
Our Government seems to be taking the position that it is possible to have its cake and eat it too; in other words, that it is possible for the public service to continue at its current size without taking a cut or freezing salaries and without public servants paying at least one-half of health insurance and pension contributions. Of course, this is dreaming in technicolour and the Brits have told us so. Every government in the world is facing and making hard choices and our Government should not be an exception. As I have said before, I do not favour cutting head count; however, there is no reason why public sector employees should not, as private sector employees do, pay one-half of their health insurance and pension contributions.
Paul Simon
Related Videos
Direct Taxation! You know it’s coming, and why not?
Those gol-darned job-stealing expats should pay their share, and how better than direct taxation?
Of course, the Cayman National Landlord Political Party might object.
No matter how beautiful the weather is here, if job-stealing expats are taxed, they will move off-island. We may as well pay taxes in our own country.
Exactly my point Scotty, but McKeeva and company seem to be hell bent on the policy of maintaining government jobs for voters.
They have to pay those employees some how.
I have to confess when I heard that the Government was using the Tower Building site for a Christian monument, I thought it was an April fool. But no, faced with a deteriorating Georgetown economy, the Government decided to use a valuable resource for a vanity project of absolutely zero economic benefit.
And just a note for those comments below, job-stealing expats already pay taxes and support the civil service non-job welfare system. It’s called work permit fees.
Nonsense Scotty,
Those excessive spending spendthrifts of MLA’s would love direct taxation it only means more money to travel on and WASTE!
Scotty I know you’re smarter than that. Why would you ask the voters to now form a pardner or partnership polling in together under the guise of direct taxation only to line the pockets of these incompetent fiscal administrators? Taxation is all that a dictator needs to complete his portfolio and it equips him to finally do as he pleases with you and yours. Direct taxation is bureaucratically a ‘LICENSE TO KILL yes kill your desire to live rather than pay all the taxes they will impose upon you and me.
If we should dare accept direct taxation, only the people will suffer. For most of that money will disappear! and FYI Direct taxation is on the list of one of the only things that the Cayman Islands does NOT need.Cayman’s status as a Leading Financial Industry will most certainly be totally destroyed.
No taxation, now, no taxation tomorrow, no taxation ever!
We need to elect real legislators that can draft and produce financial projections for the next 10 to 20 years, that will create jobs, build businesses that will put people back to work. Taxing the people is a worthless system designed to pay lazy politicians to sit on their cans and do nothing, while every body else bust their buns and are unrewarded.Taxes is a destruction to any country. It is not your friend, nor mine.
The sooner you get taxes out of your head the better.
It is a mushroom that never stops growing.
Mr. Simon,
I love the first idea, and would take my apparently stolen, dirty, filthy, unappreciated expat money and spend it right here in Cayman to live somewhere with a beautiful GT harbour view.
However, I would never do that without the port being moved. You can’t create condos near an industrial area. Full stop. Move the port somewhere (Spotts anyone?), and make downtown GT a REAL downtown, and you save the town.
Agreed on Spots. I can’t for the life of me, understand why no one is willing to look at spots to place the industrial boats who come to dock and unload the cargo, and shipping containers.
It’s already dredged for deep sea boats. It’s not populated. It has a huge parking/work area for immigration to hold vehicles.
I really don’t see the problem.
Leave the cruise ships to dock at George Town.
Oh purleez – all this nonsensical twaddle about Ex-pats stealing jobs, give me a break! All anyone hears about these days is ex-pat this and ex-pat that, and it’s all the ex-pats’ fault. What utter farcical nonsense and well you all know it.
The facts are simply that the educational standards on this island are way below what is required to do most of the specialised and technical jobs, hence why the banks, insurance and engineering companies have to hire from overseas.
The rest of the time, the Caymanian candidates who put themselves forward think the World owes them a living and often give a very poor level of commitment and effort into the job – too busy texting and Facebooking on their Blackberries to do any real work. And then belly-ache like crazy when they get passed up for promotion.
I see it every day of the ‘working’ week. If half the Caymanian workforce gave their witnessed low-‘effort’ for companies in Europe, they would out the door in no time for just not having the right attitude to work.
Along with that I see many of them come into work later than their contracted start time, taking more than their allocated lunch break times, and leaving before clock-off time. Then during the day, they spend long time slots in the canteen drinking coffee and gossiping. Even on their PCs, the most commonly seen screen isn’t their word processor or spreadsheets. It’s more usually Facebook or Windows card games. Some of them can’t even write properly or spell the most basic words that a European or Far Eastern 11-year-old child would know. As to times table to work out basic maths, don’t even start me on that one. One ‘worker’ today needed a calculator to multiply 8.5 times 10, and they had to check it twice! As to working out a 1% of 1,320 sum, it was almost too pitiful to watch.
There are, of course, a few notable exceptions who are bright – usually those who went to universities overseas – but generally the work ethic here sucks, and these companies only survive because the overseas staff know what hard work, graft and on-the-job training and ongoing-study is all about.
The harping on about ex-pats stealing jobs is simply a deflection exercise to avoid facing up to the truth and putting the blame on those who do actually graft. Added to that, they actually want to do the job, no matter how menial, because it matters to them and they take pride in their work. Some locals don’t even care and do a lazy slipshod job that sometimes has to be done all over again.
The other problem these islands have is that the GDP will never grow with the economically-suicidal policy of sending workers home. Restaurants and bars are already closing through thousands of ex-pats on rollover; some never coming back after the year break. Half of them are fed up with the constant harping on that they get just for doing a job that most Caymanians aren’t qualified or bothered to do.
These islands need around 75,000 people to keep the economy going and support the businesses that are here already. And that is a basic economic fact that other Caribbean islands of similar size and setup have finally realised. You cannot survive with too few people to maintain the tipping point of economic stability – that is simple Keynesian economics.
Finally, I would suggest that the so-called Ex-Pat-bashing brigade start having a long think about their constant attitude towards decent people who put tens of millions into the Cayman economy, because when we all leave – fed up with your constant xenophobia – you will REALLY regret the loss of all that money. And then the Caymans will be just a crime-ridden, sand-fringed swamp again.
Then you will have something to complain about, with no businesses left and no permit fees helping fund the already-pitiful Govt. spending on education necessary for Caymanians to do the jobs in the first place.
Be careful what you wish for (an ex-pat-free Cayman Islands) because you might just get what you want. Don’t look your gift-horses in the mouth!