"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference." - Mark Twain

‎"There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem." 

Which one are YOU. Are you a thinker who focuses on the problem as stated and tries to synthesize information and knowledge to achieve a solution? Or are you one who just talks about what is wrong?

My attitude these days is to try and ignore annoyances this is why I take long walks up hill, especially after listing to people who are serving up lip service by talking about things they don't really  understand!
Everyday I see things on CNN or read something in the local News papers and wonder: Are these people dealing from a full deck? The World is full of complicated issues, which is a spaghetti bowl of interconnected problems. The economy in the Affluent World is still sputtering, energy cost is still sky high. Wars are still being fought in the Middle East where most of the fuel energy comes from. The debt ceiling in the USA is the current big issue, until August, and people are acting like it is their chance to grab the brass-ring. They are hoping to take advantage of a crisis to push forward their agendas.
In My opinion: Conservatives are Idiots, Liberals are Idiots any group that is stuck on some ridiculous ideology are, YES, IDIOTS. We have crisis after crisis because IDIOT-OLOGY (I just created a new Word and a name for the Tea Party platform) maybe I should run and Patton it. What does this have to do with the SXM Perspective? Everything... clear and simple. OUR World is tied to their World. Our Tourism economy depends on us being able to host more people than we did last year (give or take 2.2 million.) because the numbers that came didn't do what we hoped they would for our economy. Let me break it down for you 1.5 million of them will most likely not return this season..... They came off the Cruise Ships, looked around, and now they can boast about having been to St. Maarten without spending hardly anything.  A NEW set will come this season and do the same thing. Maybe the numbers will be greater (hopefully) we just have to wait and see because we have no control over what the cruise lines bring. The other 700 thousand came off of air-crafts, By the way  30% were transfer passengers to our neighboring Island they left without setting foot outside of our airport.  Simple math here, that is 210 thousand who also will most likely not return to stay on St. Maarten. Where am I going with this? We are living on HOPE. We are excepting this reality and thinking to ourselves, well it is what it is. We need to STOP and start putting your thought to work and start planning, we need to look at what can be done to improve our product to create new interest in SXM. Lip service will not get it done anymore especially in these tough economic times. The Opinion article in The Daily Herald addresses the concerns of a citizen who has identifies what he sees as the problems and offers some solutions.
The problem is...... we can make suggestions for improvements but we are.... POWERLESS to bringing about CHANGE. We do not have the resources to make it happen. The days when, word of mouth brought new tourist to Island are over. Those folks who came during the good times are now aging and traveling less and less.  The Man who has the Gold (Tourism property owners) will not invest in improvements to upgrade their product unless someone can assure them that they will recover their investments within one or two seasons. Look at how long it took Mullet bay hotel owner to cleanup the mess since Hurricane Luis.*(16 long years) So here we go again another off season where we should be planning to grab our share of a NEW Tourism Market  (travelers ages 25 -50) before someone else does, We are just sitting and waiting for Government to do the impossible with a budget that can't stretch but so far. Last time I checked they took months to come up with a budget that cannot do what is necessary to run this side of the Island....... properly. Thanks to a Budget agreement that was made prior to 10-10-10 which will continue to cause us more problems than it will HELP..... we are stuck. Unless we can renegotiate these Budget constraints. We can't borrow money to create new markets, so the NEW travelers could pick other destinations offering then packages that meet their needs. This means things may not get better, we may even get to the point where more businesses doors (in some areas) will be closing which will continue to have a domino affect. Resulting in a broken SXM Product!

Playing dominoes maybe the National pastime on   St. Maarten but it is now becoming the symbol of our economic forecast, unless we come up with some new ideas that we can implement within 4 months.....

On our local news front Holiday, Shigemoto, sign budget into law  This means we can borrow a whopping NAf. 117,334,209 million for 2011. Sounds impressive until reality points out that it is half of the price tag it will take to finish the New Administration building which we are paying for without using it. Even if 117,334,209 million was in US dollars it wouldn't be enough to do much because the New Government Administration built on the SALT pond  will probably have cost over runs because they will need to replace what is already rusting etc..... So there you have it folks. We need investment Capital  and new ideas to upgrade and maintain our Product SXM.  Back when Aruba got their new status they received millions in loans from the Kingdom government to build their tourism product. We are just asking for some consideration to be able to service ours, which by the way has better numbers to date than Aruba.... We have the superior LOCATION and a more diverse Island 2 for 1.  
This is a call to action. More suggestions are needed than just those in the article below.




Some suggestions for the long-term sustainability of the tourist industry