Former prime minister Stuart Young has challenged Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar\u2019s criticism of the Opposition\u2019s vote against budget 2027, arguing that the United National Congress had itself withheld support from PNM budgets while in opposition. According to the Trinidad Express, Young made the comments in a Facebook statement after the budget bill passed in the House of Representatives on Saturday. He accused the Prime Minister of hypocrisy and said the UNC had not supported a single PNM budget between 2015 and 2024. Young characterised the budget as dishonest and unbalanced. He also repeated Opposition claims that Trinidad and Tobago was experiencing a recession under the UNC administration. Those assertions were political claims reported by the newspaper, rather than independently established economic findings in the supplied account. The former prime minister also credited the PNM administration with the Atlantic LNG restructuring achieved in December 2023 and with negotiating better gas prices. He argued that those arrangements had enabled the country to benefit from LNG cargoes available for sale and improved prices. Persad-Bissessar, in her own statement following the budget\u2019s passage, defended the spending package as a rebalancing of public resources towards law-abiding, hard-working citizens. She accused the PNM of opposing reductions to programmes her administration considered wasteful. The Prime Minister said the budget provided for increased salaries, backpay, payments for goods and services, social support and development programmes. She maintained that expenditure was being reduced on wasteful welfare schemes, ghost employees and failed projects, according to the Express report. She also defended the proposed divestment of loss-making State enterprises. Persad-Bissessar argued that the process would attract investment, improve management, modernise facilities, create sustainable employment and generate tax revenue. These were benefits she said the policy would deliver. The exchange sets out the competing positions following the House vote: Young questioned the Government\u2019s criticism of Opposition resistance, while Persad-Bissessar defended the budget\u2019s spending priorities and its proposed approach to State enterprises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A budget vote fuels a fresh political exchange<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trinidad-and-tobago"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}