‘Time hard and the dutty tough’, but…

KINGSTON, Jamaica, Observer - WE have a sense that the Government's version of JDX, being called the National Debt Exchange Offer, is a smart way to squeeze $17 billion annually out of the system, without sending the nation into panic. We will return to this tomorrow in this space. But at the same, we also have the sense that Monday night's national broadcast by Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller and Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips, which announced the JDX 2, has to be followed soon by a deeper effort to mobilise the nation around resolving our debt issue and raising revenues. The format of the announcement -- an unprecedented joint broadcast -- suggested that the Administration would be coming with radical solutions to our stubborn and protracted economic problems. We had expected something that would capture the imagination of a Jamaican populace tired of hearing pie-in-the-sky promises that are never more than that -- empty promises.