I had even emailed an avid reader of the column - who happens to be a brother in the diaspora - that I was done with Budget analysis with last week's piece on "Hardship Budgets". Then the prime minister rose to speak, raising questions about the role of government and asking people and government to take responsibility for what they are responsible.

Today is Mother's Day, May is Child Month, and Father's Day will come up in due course. One respondent to "Hardship Budgets" raised the point that if we don't control population growth, then we can't expect serious economic growth to happen. In his call to take responsibility, the prime minister said: "Poor Jamaicans so often protesting on television that they have five, six, seven children with no one to take care of them, that the Government is doing nothing for them, need to join that conversation so that it can be explained to them that no government - not this one, not the previous one, not the next one - will be able to take care of them unless they start taking care of themselves."

Actually, the overall growth rate of the population has come down nicely and is not a real problem. What is a significant problem is that the poorest Jamaicans have higher-than-average birth rates and expect the Government to look after them and their children. It's a case of poverty outbreeding prosperity. The single-mother household is almost a cause célèbre in public discourse. The most powerful contraceptive in the world is the economic advancement of young women. As women gain economic independence and power, birth rates go down.

But in a country whose unemployment rate has never been single digit and has been as high as a quarter of the labour force without the benefit of a global recession, the unemployment burden falls most heavily upon the youth, and particularly upon young women. Someone has to take responsibility.

major problems

Our biggest problems are crime, public order and public safety, the debt burden, and systemic poverty. Political garrisons present the worse cases. Someone has to take responsibility. And the two political party leaders are particularly well positioned to do so.

While the prime minister was presenting his star student with 12 CSEC passes out of the hardships of West Kingston, having taken responsibility, he was telling us that "last year, 47 per cent of the eligible cohort of students passed less than four subjects at CXC level; 15.5 per cent didn't pass a single subject! Two-thirds of our students are failing to achieve the minimum acceptable level of performance.

"We are spending this year," he continued, over $80 billion on education - 35 per cent of the Budget after debt service is taken out. We need to spend more, but we need to get more for what we are spending. For years, our emphasis has been on expanding access to education. Unwittingly, we have transformed our school system into a conveyor belt rolling at constant speed, delivering half-finished products at the end. We must pay more attention now to the quality of the products."

What an indictment! Some people have to take responsibility. Including students themselves. Teachers. School administrators. Government.

While education access has greatly expanded, unemployment has remained stubbornly above 10 per cent. The biggest difference between employment in the 1970s and unemployment towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century is the fact that in the 1970s, the unemployed were largely only primary-level educated while today, they are largely secondary-level educated, with a fair inclusion of tertiary graduates! Someone has to take responsibility for half-educating young Jamaicans, for idleness, and breeding a depen-dency on the State. Young people and their families who take responsi-bility for educational achievement have, in education, their best ticket out of poverty.

reduced spending power

YEP, the Youth Entrepreneurship Programme, follows the youth camps of the '60s, the National Youth Service, which has come and gone and come again, the HEART Trust, SOLIDARITY, etc. YEP comes at a time of economic downturn, with reduced spending power by potential customers and clients, with elders thrown out of jobs and looking for entrepreneurial hustlings themselves.

People don't talk about 'political economy' anymore. Political economy has fragmented into a motley collection of so-called social 'sciences'. Political economy used to deal with the issues of social, economic and political organisation in seamless integration seeking to provide critical answers to questions about the role of government, the role of citizen, for the freedom, happiness and wealth of the people.

As I have pointed out in an earlier column, drawing from the great 18th-century Scottish political economist, Adam Smith, government has three fundamental functions: Defence against external threats, delivering justice and law and order internally, and providing infrastructure which private enterprise can't or won't. If these are not working reasonably well, nothing else will. The thinking is clear and simple: The primary function of government is to perform duties for society, which individuals and the groups they chose to form cannot reasonably or effectively undertake.

Citizens, too, have responsibilities. Citizens are responsible for obeying just laws, participating in governance, paying taxes for the government to fulfil its responsi-bilities, looking after themselves and their own interests, and not injuring their neighbour's interest and the general public's interest. This joint responsibility of government and citizens of the polity is what the old political economists meant by the social contract.

The Budget presentation and Debate has been criticised for lacking vision and philosophical coherence, especially the contribution of the Mosaic Chief Servant who delivered well a string of ministerial reports and proposals.

my suggestions

I would like to suggest three overarching themes which could have guided the crisis Budget and which should guide others: 1) Law, order and public safety 2) Wealth creation, business development and poverty reduction 3) Human and physical capital development. Policy and programmes across portfolios would be spun off and integrated around these central themes derived from the critical core functions of government. Every good leader knows that the fewer and more focused your strategic objectives, the more likely that they will be achieved.

Taking responsibility cannot just be a homily from 'Moses'. Public policy and programmes, which have often engendered irresponsibility in the past, must be strategically crafted to push and guide movement in the desired direction.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.