The young professional affiliate of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Generation 2000 is taking issue with the recent announcement from the Opposition People’s National Party, leader Mark Golding who said he will increase the income tax threshold if his party forms the next government.
The PNP intends to have the income tax threshold to be increased to 40 per cent.
In a statement on Thursday, G2K harshly criticized the policy position by the PNP, calling it “a barefaced, hypocritical, and vulgar attempt to pirate the policies of the JLP and the Government of Prime Minister Andrew Holness.”
“It should not be forgotten that when the JLP administration of 2016 moved to increase the income tax threshold to $1.5 million in a bid to put more money into the pockets of Jamaicans, the PNP publicly bashed the plan as ‘inequitable, unworkable, extraordinarily complex and retrograde”, the group noted.
G2K claims that the JLP plan has benefited thousands of Jamaicans despite “a coordinated and sustained attack against the people-centric initiative launched by the PNP and their surrogates in civil society and the media”.
The PNP’s strong objection to the plan to increase the income tax threshold at the time, G2K says, led to its then General Secretary and now Opposition Spokesman on Finance, Julian Robinson, claiming that “the initiative to put more money into the pockets of Jamaicans would -hurt the people more than it will help.“
Robinson also at the time said the plan “represented a destructive and de-stabilizing economic policy”.
The youth group says, this “U-turn” statement of the PNP with an attempt to represent the JLP’s policy direction and intentions as their own further highlights the fact that the PNP is “willing to tear down effective policies which are in the interest of the people.”
G2K also claims this move “proves that the current Opposition is void of any original plans or ideas to move the country forward.”
The release also states that the JLP and Prime Minister Andrew Holness will not allow “PNP’s hypocritical and vulgar politicking to interfere with efforts to advance the interest of the Jamaican people.”
