Helping investors create jobs

The new year may be in but the economic outlook for 1999 has an old familiar ring that is fearsome at best, disastrous at worse, depending on our disposition to help current investors stay in business.

Therefore, it behooves local leadership — private and public sector — to reconsider whether it wishes to replay old paradigms that are regressive at best or don a new proactive attitude to salvage the balance of investors seeking help to stay afloat. We feel that the latter is the better approach given that the NMI can’t afford any further contraction of the local economy.

We’ve uttered well rehearsed rhetoric about the reduction of work hours or manpower as the “last resort” while simultaneously watch factual plunge in revenue generation by as much as $32 million. If we do it right in a timely fashion by helping businesses with incentives so they stay solvent, including reduction of income tax for consumers so to give them much needed purchasing power, we may not have to do the fire dance of “last resort”.

Pleadings for some form of incentives by investors who have helped these islands over the last 20 to 30 years didn’t spin out of thin air. This bad experience is factual everyday reality. While some 1,080 have closed shops, the urgency to salvage the balance of businesses struggling to make ends meet has intensified by ten fold over the last year. If we assist them with incentives, they’d be able to stay in business and contribute to the overall well-being of the NMI. To do otherwise is to encourage further contraction of the local economy, therefore, a more severe reduction in revenue generation as to compromise our ability to pay for basic public services.

These laws include the $100,000 deposit and the $150,000 worth of investment, other fees that have increased doing business in the NMI. And guess who are the victims of all these added costs — the consumers!

The two sectors can’t prolong its sometime contentious and divided approach to saving the local economy. It must weed out the politics of how best to stave the external and internal forces of a deepening crisis or what’s left of the economy. The public sector can’t brave impractical political solutions to economic issues. It, too, must learn to listen to the views of the private sector.

In short, our success in making a difference in economic recovery hinges on how well we handle the needs of current investors and entrepreneurs. Their well-being determines job creation. If we succeed in this area, we will have succeeded in all other future economic programs for we will have sent the right signals to other investors that the NMI is the most conducive venue for any and all investments. Think about it. It’s our livelihood at stake.