Projected expenditure in NPP manifesto reckless — Veep
The Vice-President, Mr Kwesi Amissah-Arthur, has described the projected expenditure contained in the manifesto of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) as reckless with the potential to plunge the country into financial crisis.
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He posited that Ghana would be deprived of GH¢28 billion in tax revenue, noting that the additional spending by the NPP in the region of GH¢21 billion and their proposed abolition of taxes to the tune of over GH¢6 billion would throw the economy out of gear.
Delivering a lecture to students of economics at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) last Tuesday, Mr Amissah-Arthur said the NPP manifesto was not only overambitious but the most reckless document he had read in quite a while.
It was organised by the Department of Economics of the College of Humanities and Legal Studies of the UCC on the theme, “Need to strengthen teaching and research in Economics for national development.”
Extreme partisanship
The Vice-President said proposals in the NPP manifesto would cause a fiscal deficit of about 20 per cent which the country would have a great deal of problem dealing with.
He remarked that the country was going through a period of extreme partisanship where any development action was condemned by the opposition without acknowledging a single good work of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government.
He said it was surprising that the NPP had no philosophical underpinning in its manifesto despite their long history of politics, which he described as more socially democratic.
Against that backdrop, Mr Amissah-Arthur said the NPP had implicitly accepted what the NDC had done except to criticise it for failing to ensure macroeconomic stability.
“We would have expected their manifesto to tell us how they would establish macroeconomic stability. Rather, they are so reckless in that manifesto that they are going to create more economic instability,” he added.
He said fiscal consolidation was not an event but a process, saying the NDC was in the process of reducing fiscal imbalance even as it retained its pro-poor policies and consolidate economic gains made.
He said the NPP had failed to acknowledge the Eurobond gains and 32 months of single digit inflation, saying they spent time criticising the NDC and added, “It is as if facts don’t matter.”
