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This week the government redid its budget math twice with no explanation, and gas prices climbed double digits.

Let's get into it.

Every math teacher drilled the same rule into you: show your work, not just the final answer. The government just skipped that step, twice.

For the fiscal year that just ended (2025-26), the projected surplus got cut by 56%, from $75.5 million down to $32.7 million. Turns out $239.2 million in spending nobody planned for showed up along the way ($185.6 million recurrent, $53.6 million capital), and extra revenue only covered part of the gap. For the year we're currently in (2026-27), the numbers flipped: the surplus target actually went up 30.6%, to $291.4 million, even though the revenue forecast got cut by $103.1 million. Less money coming in, bigger surplus promised.

Why now? Here's why the timing is the actual issue, not just gossip. Parliament debates and votes on the budget using the numbers government puts in front of it. That debate wrapped before anyone found out the 2025-26 surplus had been cut by more than half, which means the MPs asking questions on the floor of the House were working off figures that were already wrong. The 2026-27 revision skipped that step entirely: no supplementary statement, no announcement, just new numbers sitting in a document nobody flagged. Budgets get revised all the time, that's normal. What wasn't normal was the timing.

Somebody caught it, though. The Fiscal Responsibility Council, the independent group whose whole purpose is watching this stuff, noted dryly that the supplementary budget "was published with no accompanying notes or explanations." That's about as close to a raised eyebrow as it gets. The Council also called the new 2026-27 surplus target "aggressive" given how often revenue's been coming in short lately, and warned it may only get hit through real spending cuts before the year's out.

Opposition finance spokesman Kwasi Thompson didn't hold back either, warning that quietly revised numbers are exactly how a government ends up losing "credibility and trust." Surprisingly (or not), the government hasn't offered a public reason for either change: no press conference, no statement, nothing.

The bottom line

A national budget is basically the country's receipts: what the government said it would do with your money, and what it actually did with it. Rewriting those numbers twice in one year, with no explanation either time, isn’t a good look.

Anyways. That "aggressive" 2026-27 surplus target still has to survive contact with reality. Let’s see.

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Inflation eased slightly to 4.3% in June, down from May's 4.5%. Don't get too comfortable, though: that May number was the highest in three and a half years, going back to the scramble of 2022 when everybody and their granny was trying to travel again post-pandemic.

Just so we're on the same page: inflation is the rate at which prices rise year over year, this June compared to last June. So 4.3% means the average cost of goods and services was 4.3% higher this June than in June 2025. It's not that everything went up by exactly that much, some things barely moved, others (looking at you, gas) jumped a lot more.

The real driver here is fuel, not groceries. Gasoline prices are up 26.7% year over year and diesel is up a brutal 46.3%, pushing average pump prices to $6.97 a gallon for gas and $7.11 for diesel in June. The Middle East conflict gets most of the blame, driving up global shipping and fuel costs that ripple into everything: transport costs are up 14.1%, restaurants and hotels up 15.4%. Basically, if fuel touches it, the price went up.

You don't need a car to feel this. Higher fuel costs show up in bus fares, light bills, and really anything that came in by cargo ship or mail boat, which in this country is basically everything on the shelf. It's a global oil story more than a local one. Keep an eye on gas prices this month, they're usually the first sign of where the rest of your spending is headed.

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📡 All Four Weather Radars Are Finally Live, wrapping up a $20 million network that's been years in the making. The last one, sitting in Mayaguana since 2021, only got switched on this month. Hurricane season's already here, and forecasters finally have eyes on the whole archipelago at once.

🏖️ Cabbage Beach Vendors Want $100k To Move, and construction isn't giving them much choice. Twenty seven vendors face temporary displacement for the $550 million Four Seasons build, asking for $100,000 each plus a monthly stipend to survive the 3.5 year relocation. Talks are stuck, and nobody's promised they get their spots back.

🏥 Doctors Hospital's Former Boss Is Taking Over PHA. Charles Sealy II spent 14 years running Doctors Hospital, and now he's stepping into public healthcare, replacing Dr. Aubynette Rolle after a rough stretch of nursing shortages and last year's industrial action. He'll oversee Princess Margaret, Rand Memorial, and Sandilands.

✈️ Flyte Just Got The Green Light For Bahamas Routes. The company can now run private charters between Florida and Nassau, Bimini, Marsh Harbour, and Eleuthera using Cirrus Vision Jets built for short regional hops. Marketing starts immediately, though nobody's said exactly when flights actually begin.

📋 Running More Than One Business? You Need Separate BINs, even under the government's new One Tax system. VAT, business licenses, and property tax all move under one login, but each company still needs its own number. The point is fixing years of platforms that never talked to each other.

🚗 New Car Sales Dropped 11%, But Nobody's Panicking. Shipping delays from the Middle East conflict and typhoon damaged ports have pushed some vehicle shipments 30 to 50 percent behind schedule. BMDA president Ben Albury says he'd only worry past 20 to 25 percent, and one good month could erase the gap.

📱 Tesla Unveiled Its Driverless Cybercab, a matte gold two-seater with no steering wheel, no pedals, and butterfly doors. Elon Musk said rides should run 20 to 30 cents a mile once it's actually for sale, though there's still no purchase date. It's Tesla's first purpose-built robotaxi, joining a fleet that's so far just been repurposed Model Ys.

🔌 ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok All Went Down At Once, in what Mashable called an unusually widespread outage. Nobody's said publicly what caused it, but for a few hours yesterday, anyone leaning on AI to write essays or process invoices was stuck doing it the old fashioned way. Service was back up by the afternoon.

🚘 Uber Is Cutting 10% Of Its Staff, about 3,300 people, to get leaner ahead of its robotaxi and delivery push. The company plans to halve its small departments and cut a fifth of its managers. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the savings get reinvested into growth. Remote work is also getting squeezed, capped at just 1% of staff now.

🛢️ Chevron Is Putting $7 Billion Into Venezuelan Oil, aiming to more than double its production there over the next five years. It's the first major commitment from a US oil company since Venezuela's president was arrested back in January and Washington pushed to revive the country's oil industry. Chevron remains the only major US player still operating there.

🏀 The Clippers Just Got Hammered By The NBA, owner Steve Ballmer suspended a full year, the team fined $30 million, and five first round picks stripped starting in 2029. A league investigation found the team helped Kawhi Leonard secure off court deals to get around the salary cap. The Clippers say they'll fight the ruling.

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— The Bay Street Brief Team