Quote:
Originally Posted by MJM
The truth about Alberta's economy is that it's probably the worse off of any region with similar mineral properties of any developped country in the world. Years and years, and years of prosperity and absolutely NOTHING to show for it other than inflated housing prices and inflated wages.
I always get a kick of the hardcore Albertans here banging their prosperity drum. All it takes is a one year of a recession in this Province and it almost reverts to a third world country. You'd think that given the commodity driven economy that Alberta would be prepared in the fluctuation of oil/gas prices. Hell no! Spend, spend, spend, and than there is the gimmie, gimmie, gimmie of the people (you know, the as an Albertan i'm entitled to make 70K a year and have the biggest truck in the lot even though I have no education or seviceable skills ). There's no happy medium here. Why not level things out instead of continously shifting from end of the economic spectrum to the other?
I love this Province, love the City of Calgary, but i'm getting closer and closer to punching my ticket out. I'd rather be a little worse off in another Province with a lot more security in my job/social service, than live here and live like a Rock Star for 5 years and than spend the next 5 constantly worrying if I'm going to have a job or have to take cut backs because no one within in the government or the population in general is willing to reign things in when the going is good.
|
This whole rant is completely off-base and does not reflect reality. On pretty much all economic measures, Alberta exceeds every other province, even now. Some of the reported doom and gloom numbers only look so ghastly because year over year statisitics show a large percentage drop off. What a year-over-year percentage statistic doesn't tell you is that even this year's number is still larger than other provinces, it's only a large dropoff from last year because last year was astronomically high for any jurisdiction. Take government spending per capita. I bet even if you reduced spending by 8 billion a year this province would still be spending more than any other per capita. Just like even now Alberta still boasts the largest GDP per capita of any province (That's hardly NOTHING). It's not like this place turned into a moonscape wasteland overnight.