Curtailing govt. expenditure

The newspapers are full of wild speculations of how big government – your government – plans to raise more taxes – VAT, direct taxes, etc. to pay for its spending in the New Year. They are demanding more money for their overweight departmental budgets, taking from the already impoverished, depressed working poor, those fortunate few with a job – the working classes. (Expect more suicides!) State officials happily spend on their pet projects and heart’s desires!

However, there is another side to their income and expenditure accounts – income is supposed to balance with their expenditure and if revenues are not enough, the normal practice is cut one’s cloth accordingly and reduce spending. The point here is that where do you see talk of reducing budgets and so to be in accord with these impoverished times??

Cost cutting is a normal procedure for any enterprise – why not Sri Lanka? Even the Gulf States have to do some cutting of expenditure occasionally – it is absurd to expect the poor masses of Sri Lanka to foot the bill.

The chief benefit of free-enterprise is that all employees work and each one contributes to the success of the enterprise – there is no overstaffing, even for six days a week – no time off for attending weddings and funerals even for uncles and aunts twice removed!

Here we are dealing with overstaffed government bureaucracies – which are a curse on the taxpayer and the common man worldwide.

Government officials resist budget cuts; they dislike them because they diminish their influence and status! But the truth is that ballooning budgets are crippling Sri Lankan society. But who will do the pruning – cutting one’s cloth according to the money available?

The Health Service has teams of doctors, specialists going to the villages to warn about diabetes. There are 75,000 villages in Sri Lanka, so it may take some time to visit them all – several decades in fact. During this time, of course, the number of persons suffering from diabetes is spiraling forever upwards: specialist doctors, nurses, hospital staff are overworked with this never ending tsunami of cases.. More hospitals need to be built to accommodate all these cases of diabetes.

But, as everyone knows, diabetes is a preventable disease and if caught in the early stages, can be prevented. Let our food be our medicine! Exercise is also a good medicine.

On the basis of this knowledge it can be argued that it would be considerably cheaper to persuade people over forty years of age to control their diet and eliminate sweet foods and even carbohydrates, and to occasionally give their pancreas a rest. By persuading people to actively control what they eat, this may save the Health Service considerable amounts of tax-payers money in reduced admittances to hospitals and the associated savings on insulin and other drugs.

Priyantha Hettige