His comment, published in the chamber’s newsletter, was more or less guaranteed to generate a headline, but was its author guilty of exaggerating the consequences of government failing to get a grip on public finances?
The answer, of course, is that we shall not know until 2012 has come and gone. It is, however, possible to see, even at this stage of the game, that the relentless rate of growth of public-sector spending in this Island must be controlled if financial calamity of some sort is to be avoided.
It is the case that Mr Keen, as chamber president and as an ordinary concerned citizen, has long pointed to the profligacy of the States as a fundamental problem in our community. As a result, some say that he merely has a particularly irritating bee in his bonnet – not least because the disaster he has been forecasting for some time has yet to arrive.
But his views cannot be dismissed so lightly. Indeed, they are now endorsed in principle by the man responsible for putting the choke-chain on excessive spending, Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf.
Meanwhile, the prediction that we could be facing GST at six per cent within a couple of years might boil down to a pessimistic piece of crystal ball gazing, but it is actually easy to understand why Mr Keen has identified the Island’s newest tax as the emergency measure most likely to be invoked if matters go from bad to worse.
Levied at three per cent, GST is no huge penalty – in spite of what its opponents say – but from its inception it was clear that at some point a hike in the tax would be seen as a relatively trouble-free means of raising extra cash. The rate was capped at three per cent for three years, but that offered little comfort to anyone remotely wise in the ways of government. A fiscal tap that might soon be turned on so easily will be hard to ignore.
If GST at three per cent is no big deal, particularly with income support measures in place, six per cent would be another matter entirely. We should therefore hope and expect that, as Mr Keen urges, States departments and States Members will, as never before, align themselves with efforts to curb spending, led in this case by Senator Ozouf.
