Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
I find myself more and more interested in a consumption tax in general, where income tax is abolished and you pay a tax based on your consumption. I am worried about how this might effect some of the communities close to the border (as it would be higher than the provinces they border most likely), but it would be worth considering in my opinion.
I'm also not sure on the spending vs. revenue problem. I guess my thinking is that its a spending priority problem. The revenues are what they are, but I don't want to services cut. To that end I'm more in favour of cutting administration. I feel the same way about the Calgary Board of Education and them not cutting front line positions and look for areas of admin to be cut first, if any positions need to be.
Some of the statistics are misleading in general; the increase in spending is probably really high. So is the level of immigration into the province. We also faced enormous cuts as a province in the relatively recent future and probably over-cut at that point. Returning to something sustainable means a huge increase in spending to get there.
The handling of the Heritage fund is a disgrace. There was a political leader advocating that the government put away some money for the tough times that would eventually come, but that didn't get a lot of press or public support.
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Spending
per capita is grossly out of line in Alberta, even after adding a million people this past decade.
The real issue is that the civil service isn't getting it's bang for its buck because of the cronyism that will inevitably happen when the same party is allowed to reign for close to four decades. We need a change of governemnt for a long enough time to dump tory friendly civil servants.
With regards to said leader who called for the Heritage fund to pocket 100% of oil and gas revenue during the last boom - Definately good advice, however after review of said leader's policy planks in the ensuing election I was hard pressed to find proposals that meant
less spending as opposed to the multitude of planks advocating
more spending. Somehow while spending billions more he proposed we save 100% of oil and gas revenue. Simply did not add up, just like his election fortunes.