‘Austerity’: Just a Slogan?

The Issue: The administration’s austerity program seems a politically correct slogan to snare and divert public attention from critical review.

Our View: We’ve heard too many pronouncements about austerity only to see it violated with the usual picnic attitude while our house is on fire!

The general public is no longer ignorant nor tolerant with the manner with which our public officials have dealt with suspect pronouncements about austerity. They say one thing and do the exact opposite. We hear of travels being curtailed only to see more government types heading to jetways for various seminars or conferences abroad. It’s the usual attitude of rearranging the fire in order to avoid burning the fish on the grill.

One such trip is the bid to augment promoting the Northern Marianas in Japan by a contingent of more than 12 people (mostly government officials, their spouses and consultants) who will be returning tomorrow. Again, we plunge right into rearranging the fire so we don’t burn the fish on the grill. Here are reasons why the promotion being touted is at best, suspect:

• Leadership seems oblivious to Japan’s biggest corporations now undergoing restructuring, a move that would translate into more than 30,000 job cuts among private sector Japanese employees. Would jobless people really venture a vacation when hardship is staring at them right in the eye?

• The Japanese Diet has just approved another supplemental public works budget to cushion recovery efforts until such time that the private sector is back on its feet. This effort would take three years before Japan Inc. determines that in fact it has attained real economic recovery. It’ll take another three years before the benefits of such recovery trickles down to places like the NMI.

• The taxpayers money spent on this junket trip is best expended appealing to the Clinton administration to include the CNMI in its efforts to ascertain that the “economic good times” doesn’t leave this tiny American archipelago “behind”. The trip only confirms how out of focus local leadership has been (and still is) on a dire economic situation in these isles.

Finally, if the NMI can’t get its act together (bringing all principals to a single room to trump out and resolve why it still costs more for a trip to the islands from Japan over neighboring Guam), it goes to further confirm local leadership being out of focus in the resolution of substantive issues that require serious review.
The fire rearrangement syndrome must cease once and for all so that austerity is given substance. Si Yuus Maase`!