There is something wholly incongruous with Prime Minister Joseph Muscat taking to the airwaves for two consecutive Sundays to boast about how great international credit rating agencies believe the Maltese economy is doing, and to make sweeping statements about how the Average Joe is benefitting from the government’s magnanimous economic policies.

Excuse us for not merely taking him at his word, but we have been here before.

Last Sunday and the Sunday before that, the prime minister took to the radio waves to deliver his Sunday sermon, and both Sundays he boasted about these wonderful ratings from Fitch and Moody’s.

We will not even get into the fact that governments purchase these ratings, or into the rumours that they can be manipulated in any which way, and we would rather put our money on assessments from the likes of Moneyval and organisations of that ilk.

Yes, it is true that they have both upgraded the country’s credit rating, and it is true that the government has had a whopping budgetary surplus to work with over the last few years thanks to the money coming in from passport sales.

But the problem with all the boasting about these ratings and reports is that the information given to the press by way of the Department of Information, we strongly suspect, has been cherry-picked so as to paint a picture appealing to the eye of the prime minister and his loyal subjects. 

The only problem is that we are not being given the whole picture.  There was a time in the not too distant past when this administration, and even the previous administration, would make the whole report available to the press or at least to certain sections of the press, so that we could report the whole thing: the good, the bad and the ugly.

There were times, a long time ago, when a government was once honest with the press.  Those were times when not everything was a beauty contest and when the country was run as it should be run, and not by the equivalent of press relations agency.

But nowadays what we have is a pretty picture drawn up by the finance ministry and vetted very carefully to ensure none of the risk downsides or assessments see the light of day.

The problem is that without publishing the actual full assessments, how are we supposed to know what is actually in those reports?

Instead, we have platitudes being dispensed by the prime minister and the finance minister about how great we are doing as a nation, but at the same time it is no big secret that the Average Joe is feeling the pinch.

That, coincidentally, is quite rich coming from a man who has acknowledged that he does not manage to save a single cent from his far from average salary.

But then we have the same person taking to the airwaves to boast about how the reports from the credit rating agencies “reflect what Maltese people are experiencing” and that people’s quality of life had drastically improved under his reign.

But somehow this does not seem to tally with reality.

The reality of the situation is reflected by recent Eurostat figures which show that the Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) of Maltese households, a measure of material welfare of households, was 20% less than the EU average. On the other hand, GDP stood at 98% of the EU average. This seems to indicate that, while GDP is almost in line with the European average, this growth is not necessarily trickling down to the average household, whose AIC is only 80% of the EU average.

Moreover, other recent figures show, conversely, that Maltese consumers are paying on average 12% more than their EU peers for staple food products. Indeed, the Maltese are being treated to the ninth-highest prices for food and non-alcoholic beverages in the EU.

It is significant that countries like the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, all of which have higher averages wages and greater consumer purchasing power, have far cheaper food prices.

The data showed, for example, how the Maltese are paying 11% more than the European average for staples such as bread and cereals, and 17% more on items such as milk, cheese and eggs.

What, exactly, is going on?  We are not entirely sure, admittedly, but one thing is for certain: Maltese consumers and the average wage earners are getting the short end of the stick here, and against that there is no argumentation.

And to make matters worse still, the price of one of those staples which is already more expensive than the EU average, milk, is set to rise further as from Monday unless an investigation by the competition office finds otherwise before then.

In the meantime, we would recommend that the Office for Competition looks into a number of other staples and consumables to find out how and where Maltese consumers are being fleeced, and why.

The prime minister likes to speak of trickledown economics. 

There is definitely a trickle, of that there is no argument, but it is doubtful that it is trickling down to everyone.  It is no good bragging about credit rating reports when the man in the street is not feeling the effects. 

The problem becomes even greater when the government brags about all this economic growth when we have a very real and growing problem of people not being able to afford their daily bread or a roof over their head.