Skip to content

User login

What is OpenID?
Connect with Facebook

Advertising

Home » Blogs » Taran Rampersad's blog

One Hand Doesn't Know What The Other Is Doing?

June 10, 2010 by Taran Rampersad

I find it difficult to believe that on one hand, the newly appointed Minister of Community Development plans to wean out handouts while on the other hand the People's Partnership Campaign promise of lobbing laptops out of the Red House for children: 

Newly-appointed Community Development Minister Nizam Baksh will be moving towards weaning out social programmes which act as handouts causing an increase in the poverty bracket. Speaking to reporters after a tree-planting exercise at Lady Hochoy Home, Gasparillo, on Tuesday, Baksh said people must not depend too much on handouts. He said his philosophy was that people should be taught how to catch a fish rather than give them...

 Really? So what exactly is it about the laptop issue that doesn't make it an ill-conceived handout?

Or has the People's Partnership undergone a lobotomy such that the philosophy of the Minister of Community Development varies from that of the People's Partnership? 

Bookmark/Search this post with:
Permalink

Comments

Handouts vs. entitlements

June 10, 2010 by Ian Ramjohn, 13 weeks 11 hours ago
Comment id: 659

Handouts are things you give to people who don't want to work. If it only goes to poor people, it's a handout. Note that middle class people can "fall on hard times". If that happens, it's OK - they remain "good people", and they are deserving of "assistance". If the benefits also accrue to middle and upper-income people, then it's only "fair".

Handouts go to people who we can define as other. If it goes to "people like us", it's not a handout.

Yup.

June 10, 2010 by Taran Rampersad, 13 weeks 9 hours ago
Comment id: 660

And yet, here we still are...

AdaptiveThemes