09/01/2026
The UNC’s Tax Trap: How a Government Elected on Hope Is Balancing Its Books on the Backs of the Poor
Barely months into office, the United National Congress has revealed the uncomfortable truth behind its economic strategy: when faced with fiscal pressure, this government does not reform, it taxes. A rapid succession of new and increased levies on traffic offences, alcohol, landlords, and gambling has left citizens reeling, not because hardship is new, but because deception now feels institutionalised.
The UNC did not stumble into this moment. It campaigned its way here on promises it has already abandoned.
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar was unequivocal on the campaign trail. No new taxes. No additional burden on struggling families. And, most memorably, the declaration that “you cannot tax a country into prosperity.” Yet just seven months into the administration, taxation has become the government’s default fiscal instrument. Not after structural reform. Not after waste reduction. Not after aggressive revenue recovery from corruption or inefficiency. But first tax the people.
This is not fiscal responsibility. It is fiscal surrender.
The economic challenges facing Trinidad and Tobago were neither hidden nor sudden. The UNC knew the state of public finances before the election and still chose to campaign on relief rather than honesty. To now reverse course without apology or explanation is not leadership it is a breach of mandate. Governments may change policy, but when they do so in direct contradiction to their central promise, they forfeit moral authority.
Worse still, these taxes have been introduced with no meaningful protections for those most exposed to harm. In the rental market, new burdens on landlords, absent reform of the Rent Restriction Act, amount to an open invitation for rent hikes. The Act is outdated, narrow, and functionally useless for most tenants. The UNC knows this. Yet it has chosen to tax first and protect later, if at all. The result will be predictable and cruel, higher rents, greater housing insecurity, and more families forced to choose between shelter and survival.
The gambling tax increases follow the same cynical pattern. Sold as social responsibility, they are in practice social abandonment. Trinidad and Tobago already has the Gambling (Gaming) Act, 2021, but the government has failed to enforce it with any seriousness. Operators will simply lower payout ratios to maintain profits, ensuring that the tax burden is absorbed by gamblers, many of whom come from low-income communities. This is not regulation. It is state-sanctioned exploitation dressed up as morality.
Alcohol excise increases under the Excise Act, expose just how disconnected this government has become from the lives of working people. Framing higher alcohol prices as a public health intervention is convenient rhetoric, but hollow policy. Social drinking is part of the cultural fabric of Trinidad and Tobago. Prices will rise, consumption will not meaningfully fall, and household budgets will shrink. This is not health policy. It is a cash grab that pretends virtue.
Traffic fine increases under the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act may be the most revealing of all. Road safety is a legitimate concern, but the UNC’s approach lacks proportionality, discretion, and economic awareness. For a minimum-wage worker, a single fine can erase a week’s income. When enforcement becomes economically devastating, it ceases to be corrective and becomes punitive. This government is criminalising poverty one fine at a time.
Taken together, these measures reveal a troubling pattern, the UNC has chosen the fastest path to revenue, regardless of social cost. There is no evidence of serious expenditure reform, no visible crackdown on inefficiency, and no sequencing of policy that places protection before taxation. Instead, the state extracts first and explains later, if at all.
This is why public trust is eroding so quickly. Citizens did not vote for an accounting exercise; they voted for empathy, fairness, and change. What they are receiving is a technocratic shell game that shifts responsibility downward while power remains insulated above.
If Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar wishes to salvage credibility, she must confront an uncomfortable reality, this tax regime contradicts everything her party promised. Compassion cannot be retrofitted after the fact. People-centred governance does not begin with higher bills and end with excuses.
Leadership is not measured by how efficiently a government raises revenue, but by who it chooses to burden when money is short. On that measure, the UNC is failing. And unless this course is reversed, history will remember this moment not as one of difficult but necessary reform, but as the point at which a government elected on hope chose instead to govern by extraction.
