November 19, 2012Dear Sir,Our most pressing problem, no matter what our political persuasion, is our National Debt, and the question of our time is how to deal with it? As it stands now, every child in Bermuda is going to inherit a debt that will weigh down our economy for the rest of his or her life. If this debt is not brought under control soon it will lead to the bankruptcy of our beloved Island home. This problem is not one that we have ever faced before. It will require very skilful management if we are ever to work our way out of this debt. Above all we are going to need real growth in our economy, as that really is the only way out. The present Progressive Labour Party Government came into power with a strong economy and a strong balance sheet. But since the time of Dame Jennifer Smith, the PLP leaders have increasingly overspent their budgets, given themselves luxury cars, first class air tickets, police escorts, and awarded projects to their cronies at inflated prices without bids from other parties. Did they ever stop to think that revenue of our country did not belong to them, that it belonged to the people of our country and that they owed their people a duty to run the government in a responsible way?What Bermuda needs now is a new management team with some real business sense. It is not going to be easy to balance our budget or get real growth in revenue but it can be done. We have hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty office space waiting for new businesses, a large surplus of available residential accommodation, hundreds of apartments owned by the middle class that now lie empty, a group of professional accountants and lawyers that are among the best in the world, a reinsurance business that is the envy of other offshore centres and a geographic location that is second to none. Surely that is the base of our solution. All we have to do is have a Government that can run the country in a sensible and responsible way. The stakes are too high to allow the present policies of the PLP to continue any longer. We have had enough and have to bring about a change.CICEROWarwick